Webster

Webmachine-inspired HTTP for the JVM.

Please be aware that this is just a proof-of-concept implementation. It's not ready for being used anywhere near a production system.

Try out the example!

Rationale

Webster is a library to build HTTP servers using Java 8. It implements key HTTP features like content negotation and conditional requests so you don't have to. The goal is to help developers build applications that adhere to the HTTP spec without having to reimplement the same things over and over again. It also tries to keep things simple by using plain Java without resorting to heavy use of annotations or reflection. Lastly, it's built for async IO using the great Netty library.

Resource centric

The primary concept in Webster are resources. Handling a request is done in two steps:

The URL of the request is used to identify a matching resource. If no resource is found a 404 response is returned.
If a matching resource is found, this resource is then responsible for handling the request. To accomplish this, it declares which HTTP methods are supported, which content types are available, when it expires, how etags are computed and so on. Based on this information Webster will generate the HTTP response which is returned to the client.

To implement the second step, Webster uses an approach which is similar to the one pioneered by Webmachine. Each request is processed according to this diagram (or at least very similarly). This is the main thing Webster does for you (implemented here).

As an application developer, you can focus on your application specific resources.

This approach makes explicit which status code is returned and which headers are set in which situation. You don't have to make these decisions again and again. Instead, its handled consistently across resources. Focusing on resources also allows a much more complete implementation of the HTTP feature set. E.g. conditional requests are not supported properly by many traditional HTTP libraries/frameworks.

But the approach chosen by Webster is also more restrictive. You cannot just return whatever response you want in any given situation (well, you can, but it's not encouraged). The purpose of this prototypical implementation largely lies in finding the right balance between being restrictive and allowing flexibility.

Async & containerless

Webster does not block the thread that initially accepts a HTTP request. Instead, request processing is done asynchronously using Java 8's CompletableFutures (tutorial). You are also not required to use a servlet container. Webster does non-blocking IO using Netty. Just package your entire application as a JAR including dependencies and you're set!

Simply Java

Webster is built using plain Java (except for generating HTML which is done using Scalate). This makes it easy to get started using a familiar environment, great IDE support and very robust & fast compiler. It should also provide a sound basis for using it from other JVM languages.

Getting started

Setup

Add this dependency to your Maven POM (or whatever build system you're using):

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.innoq</groupId>
    <artifactId>webster-core</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>
</dependency>

If you want to serve HTML, add this as well:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.innoq</groupId>
    <artifactId>webster-html</artifactId>
    <version>0.1.0</version>
</dependency>

Example application

Have a look at webster-example for an example application. Just cloning the example app, running it locally and diving into the code is the easiest way to get started.

Hello world

The following will start a server which is listening for requests on localhost:8080/hello.

import webster.netty.Server;
import webster.requestresponse.Request;
import webster.resource.Resource;
import webster.routing.RoutingTable;

import java.util.Optional;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletableFuture;

import static webster.routing.RoutingBuilder.from;
import static webster.routing.RoutingBuilder.routingTable;

public class App {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        RoutingTable routingTable = routingTable()
                .withRoute(from("/hello").toResource(new HelloWorld()))
                .build();

        new Server.Builder().withPort(8080).build().run(routingTable);
    }

    public static class HelloWorld implements Resource {

        @Override
        public CompletableFuture<Boolean> doesRequestedResourceExist(Request request) {
            return CompletableFuture.completedFuture(true);
        }

        @Override
        public CompletableFuture<Object> entity(Request request) {
            return CompletableFuture.completedFuture("<h1>Hello from Webster!</h1>");
        }

        @Override
        public CompletableFuture<Optional<String>> etag(Request request) {
            return CompletableFuture.completedFuture(Optional.of("1"));
        }
    }
}