package dream

  1. Overview
  2. Docs
Tidy, feature-complete Web framework

Install

Dune Dependency

Authors

Maintainers

Sources

dream-1.0.0-alpha7.tar.gz
sha256=b715cecf7e2b249335c8d1cd22c3e87017e40c0556774d209f338f9d78388c86

Description

Dream is a feature-complete Web framework with a simple programming model and no boilerplate. It provides only two data types, request and response.

Almost everything else is either a built-in OCaml type, or an abbreviation for a bare function. For example, a Web app, known in Dream as a handler, is just an ordinary function from requests to responses. And a middleware is then just a function from handlers to handlers.

Within this model, Dream adds:

  • Session management with pluggable back ends.
  • A fully composable router.
  • Support for HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTPS.
  • WebSockets.
  • GraphQL, including subscriptions and a built-in GraphiQL editor.
  • SQL connection pool helpers.
  • Server-side HTML templates.
  • Automatic secure handling of cookies and forms.
  • Unified, internationalization-friendly error handling.
  • A neat log, and OCaml runtime configuration.
  • Helpers for Web formats, such as Base64url, and a modern cipher.

Because of the simple programming model, everything is optional and composable. It is trivailly possible to strip Dream down to just a bare driver of the various HTTP protocols.

Dream is presented as a single module, whose API is documented on one page. In addition, Dream comes with a large number of examples. Security topics are introduced throughout, wherever they are applicable.

README

README.md

Dream

Easy-to-use, feature-complete Web framework without boilerplate.


Quick Start | Tutorial | Reference   



Dream is one flat module in one package, documented on one page, but with many examples. It offers:


...all without sacrificing ease of use — Dream has:


Every part of the API is arranged to be easy to understand, use, and remember. Dream sticks to base OCaml types like string and list, introducing only a few types of its own — and some of those are just abbreviations for bare functions!

The neat interface is not a limitation. Everything is still configurable by a large number of optional arguments, and very loose coupling. Where necessary, Dream exposes the lower-level machinery that it is composed from. For example, the basic body and WebSocket readers return strings, but you can also do zero-copy streaming.

You can even run Dream as a quite bare abstraction over its underlying set of HTTP libraries, where it acts only as minimal glue code between their slightly different interfaces.

And, even though Dream is presented as one package for ordinary usage, it is internally factored into several sub-libraries, according to the different dependencies of each, for fast porting to different environments.

Dream is a low-level and unopinionated framework, and you can swap out its conveniences. For example, you can use TyXML with server-side JSX instead of Dream's built-in templates. You can bundle assets into a single Dream binary, or use Dream in a subcommand. Dream tries to be as functional as possible, touching global runtime state only lazily, when called into.


Quick start

You can get one of the first tutorials and build it locally with:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aantron/dream/master/example/quickstart.sh)"

opam

Create a project directory with an optional local switch:

mkdir project
cd project
opam switch create . 5.1.0
eval $(opam env)

Install Dream:

opam install dream

After that, go to any of the examples, such as 2-middleware, re-create the files locally, and run it:

dune exec ./middleware.exe

esy

Visit any of the examples, such as 2-middleware, and re-create the files locally. The file esy.json shows how to depend on Dream. All of the examples are installed by running npx esy, and started with npx esy start.


Documentation


Recommended projects


Example repositories


Contact

Apart from the issues, good places to discuss Dream are...

Highlight @antron to poke @aantron specifically.


Contributing

All kinds of contributions are welcome, including examples, links to blogs, related libraries, and, of course, PRs! See CONTRIBUTING.md.

As an immediate note, if you'd like to clone the repo, be sure to use --recursive, because Dream uses several git submodules:

git clone https://github.com/aantron/dream.git --recursive

Acknowledgements

Dream is based on work by the authors and contributors of its many dependencies and their transitive dependencies. There are, however, several influences that cannot be discovered directly:

OCaml

Innovation. Community. Security.