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> http4s is a very capable library (and if you care much about composition it is excellent), but I wouldn't describe the documentation as beginner friendly. A s

by klabb3 4y ago

> http4s is a very capable library (and if you care much about composition it is excellent), but I wouldn't describe the documentation as beginner friendly. A slightly better starting point for scala 3 + type-safe server building is tapir I am not a scala user but this sounds like a serious violation of composability (ironically), for something so ubiquitous as http. I don't really mind advanced features being available for power users, or later optimizations, but I really dislike being forced to make a mutually exclusive decision between simple and performant, early in the project lifecycle. I think Rust unfortunately often falls in this category as well with async and multiple http libraries, and even the inofficial doctrine of deferring ownership decisions for later. In Go there's basically one way to do things, and the few more advanced things you can do can be opted into later. I assume this is a quality inherited from C, and it's extremely pragmatic and creates a composable ecosystem.

valenterry 4y ago
If anything the documentation isn't great. Http4s is an advanced library and maybe expects some knowledge about PFP and related datatypes. They should make that clear to everyone imho. But other than that, running a simple hello-world service with http4s really isn't that hard. object Main extends StreamApp[IO] { val helloWorldService = HttpService[IO] { case GET -> Root / "hello" / name => Ok(s"Hello, $name.") } override def stream(args: List[String], requestShutdown: IO[Unit]) = BlazeBuilder[IO] .bindHttp(8080, "localhost") .mountService(helloWorldService, "/") .serve } Yeah, there are a couple of things that are more complex than with other simple webservers. For instance, what is the "IO" thing doing there? Well, http4s flexibly allows you to choose different libraries for handling concurrency without even knowing those libraries. Very few other programming languages are even powerful enough to support something like that, so it obviously confuses people. And then you need a StreamApp (there are other alternatives but that's the one from the documentation) and people might wonder why - they want a simple request/response webservice and nothing "streaming". Other than that, I don't think the code is overly complicated.

by klabb3 4y ago

valenterry 4y ago

If anything the documentation isn't great. Http4s is an advanced library and maybe expects some knowledge about PFP and related datatypes. They should make that clear to everyone imho. But other than that, running a simple hello-world service with http4s really isn't that hard. object Main extends StreamApp[IO] { val helloWorldService = HttpService[IO] { case GET -> Root / "hello" / name => Ok(s"Hello, $name.") } override def stream(args: List[String], requestShutdown: IO[Unit]) = BlazeBuilder[IO] .bindHttp(8080, "localhost") .mountService(helloWorldService, "/") .serve } Yeah, there are a couple of things that are more complex than with other simple webservers. For instance, what is the "IO" thing doing there? Well, http4s flexibly allows you to choose different libraries for handling concurrency without even knowing those libraries. Very few other programming languages are even powerful enough to support something like that, so it obviously confuses people. And then you need a StreamApp (there are other alternatives but that's the one from the documentation) and people might wonder why - they want a simple request/response webservice and nothing "streaming". Other than that, I don't think the code is overly complicated.