Therefore, I decided to wrap it in some helper functions to make it as pleasant to work with for the new F# web developers as possible. And ... I’ve got somewhat carried away. This is the true origin of this project.

Before F# I was primarily into the Python, and I had really good experience with Django. I wanted to make my helper look more like Django but more I wrote, more it resembled Flask instead.

I have recently open sourced it under the MIT license on GitHub. I hope this will help with making other web developers more interested in seemingly niche language of F#.

I use it for a side project (some SPA app) I work on over the weekends. Therefore, I frequently change and update it as I encounter more missing things or parts that do not please me.

So, all the feedback is welcome! I am especially interested if you find the framework API intuitive enough for non-F# folks.

Thanks for your time!

Giraffe: https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe Saturn: https://github.com/SaturnFramework/Saturn Falco: https://github.com/pimbrouwers/Falco Wiz: https://github.com/samueleaton/wiz

Django's API is now clearly dated. I still use it massively though, because it's insanely productive for CRUD apps, which are 99% of my client requests.

They made some hard choices about the auth and db layer, and they are imperfect, but when left to do the choice myself in other frameworks, I often miss Django. You really value all it gives you once you've lost it.

It depends. My advice is always: stick to django no matter what, unless you are a seasoned web devs. I've seen too many flask projects with terrible architecture decisions and security holes because flask assumes (by nature) you can take those decisions.

Those decisions are not easy to take. They require a deep knowledge of the field.

So yes, one may chose flask or fast api as a lighter alternative, provided they know very well what they are doing, or that the consequences of not knowing are small. The later is not always simple to evaluate however, especially if you are not experienced. You don't know what you don't know after all.

If somebody doesn't know if they are an experienced web dev, or the consequences of their choices, they should use Django.

It will save them from SQL injection, XSS, Cross request forgery and click hijacking. It will provide an pluggable auth backend should you need it later. It will force you to put some parts of your code in separate sillows. This is a good thing for most people.

Flask-SQLalchemy is not well integrated at all. E.G: try to play with it in the shell, the session management is annoying as hell.

As of flak-login, it doesn't have a tenth of the

Also you forgot: csrf handling, i18n, xss, click hijacking, cache backends, and so on. That's again, more plugins you have to select.

And that's a lot to configure, learn doc, then upgrade when the times come, on top of that.

All of them will, obviously, not be compatible with SQLA 2 next year, because the projects are not a whole, so it's going to be even more fun on the months to come.

I really think a beginner should not use that.

However, I have been using FastAPI with Jinja2 & htmx to create web APIs and UIs for some of our services. Individually, they're great; collectively they're a joy. I'm no front end dev, but even I can put together functional, decent-looking apps in a few hundred lines of code. They bare comparison to angular apps that can easily be an order of magnitude more code.

I mostly agree with you on Django though. But as you said - most apps are CRUD apps.

Not to discourage you or anything - always good to see alternatives. Personally, for FP web programming, the closer to the "your server as a function" ideal the better - so I'd prefer Giraffe in this case, for things like the router being an HttpHandler instead of being a property on the app instance. It's just way more intuitive from an FP standpoint and produces neater, more self-contained code, IMO.

https://dotnetthoughts.net/minimal-api-in-aspnet-core-mvc6/

Agree. dev experience is missing in dotnet IMO. I had the exact same sentiment last year. made https://wiz.run/

I hated going through all the microsoft dotnet docs. Wanted something like this: https://wiz.run/api/

https://github.com/darklang/dark/blob/main/fsharp-backend/sr...

As I recall, Suave is on its way out, and was replaced by Saturn. Saturn is built on Giraffe.

I found Saturn to be incredibly confusing because you need to understand both it and Giraffe to be able to use it.

I used Giraffe for a while, but I still needed to understand the ASP.NET middleware approach, which didn't match Giraffe's.

Also, ASP.NET has a new endpoint based routing framework which is supposed to be very fast. Giraffe has started to adopt that, but I found most of the docs refer to the old way of doing things. So although I'm using it a little bit in the code above, I found it easier to just use ASP.NET directly in most cases.

Honestly, I do not find their goal of being a functional interface to ASP.NET Core sufficiently compelling. Maybe they should be a bit more specific?

    python -m http.server 8000

go http.ListenAndServe(":8000", nil)

Love it.

  require('http').createServer((req, res) => res.end('Hello World')).listen(8000)

C# version.

var app = WebApplication.Create(args); app.MapGet("/",() => "Hello World"); app.Run();

sudo service apache2 start