Here comes the Sun

We have seen rapid development of Java itself these days. The introduction of functional programming elements made Java coding experience quite sharper.

However, the Java web ecosystem is still with its early days . The Servlet API is dated, heavy and verbose. Even with Spring boot has improved Java development, simpler abstraction like Python's WSGI is still my preference.

So I started Espresso, a core web abstraction and a family of micro libraries to support it. The idea of Espresso is highly inspired by Clojure's Ring and Rust's Iron. And the name Espresso is specially chosen for Java. Imaging the Java web application is a cup of coffee, the Espresso is the soul of it.

The core of Espresso is quite simple, it's a function takes a Request object and returns a Response object. There is also an asynchronous variant.

A hello world web application with espresso can be simple as:

import io.github.espresso4j.espresso.*;
import io.github.espresso4j.jettino.Jettino;

public class App {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        new Jettino().start((req) -> Response.of(200).body("It works."));
    }

}

Basically the application starts a jetty server and hosts a web application that return HTTP 200 and a body of It works.;

To make Espresso usable, the initial family of the system contains:

• Jettino: A web server adapter to run Espresso with Jetty.
• Latte: A URL router to route request to particular espresso function, based on URL pattern. And it generates an espresso application itself.
• Sugar: A parameter extractor for dealing with query string, form and Json body.

A simple demo is available here. You can grab and run it with gradle run. The code is super easy to understand.

The libraries have been published on Maven central.

Call for collaboration

To grow a ecosystem, it requires quite a lot work on upstream/downstream libraries, documents and communication. I have some ideas to be implemented like:

• Extensible session middleware
• Cookie middleware
• Content negotiation
• Spring-boot integration

If you find the library and idea interesting and want to join me in the development on code, doc, design and communication, feel free to contact me via the email list on my github page.