A clever exaggeration of apps-in-a-snap.

Noun: A type of alcoholic beverage that may take several forms.
Origin: derived from the colloquial German word Schnaps /ʃnɑːps/

Schnapps is a precise toolkit to rapidly develop production-grade, self-contained WebApps and RESTful services over HTTP and WebSockets. It is completely written in Scala and is compatible with Java as well.

Backend developers spend a big chunk of their precious time on redundant activities across projects like app configuration & its management, connectivity to external systems, integration of auth mechanisms, app packaging, etc. They get bound to excessively complex tools/ frameworks, and eventually, these tools drive the development and not the other way around.

Schnapps provides the boilerplate code for all these activities so that developers can focus on what matters the most - Application Logic.

Features

• Standardized JSON-based project configuration out-of-the-box
• Allows embedded servers (built on Apache Dubbo) that hosts mostly managed services
• Inbuilt authentication and authorization using Apache Shiro
• Allows synchronous/ asynchronous web applications and services over HTTP and RPCs
• Managed connectors to external systems like LDAP, JDBC, etc.

Quick SchnappStart

Getting started with Schnapps is as straight-forward as it can get, as exactly 3 things need to be done,

• Get it
• Configure it
• Use it

Get Schnapps

To get Schnapps, you need to add its dependency according to your build tool.

• For Maven-based projects, add the following repository and dependency to your pom.xml

   <repositories>
      ...
      
      <repository>
         <id>ossrh</id>
         <url>https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/</url>
      </repository>
  
      ...
   </repositories>
  

   <dependencies>
      ...
  
      <dependency>
          <groupId>com.github.chitralverma</groupId>
          <artifactId>schnapps-core</artifactId>
          <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
      </dependency>
      
      ...
   </dependencies>
  

Use Schnapps

Depending on whether you use Schnapps in Scala or Java project, the usage syntax changes ever so slightly.

Configuring the project

Use the minimum configuration template available here and pass the location of the JSON config file as the first argument to the program. To initialize the config, follow the steps below,

In Java projects,

Configuration config = ConfigParser.parse(args); 

In Scala projects,

val config: Configuration = ConfigParser.parse(args);

Note:

• Configuration is a singleton. That means, once it's parsed, you can refer to it anywhere in the code statically by ConfigParser.getConfiguration().
• A complete config template is available here.

Writing your first service

For Java projects, the examples are available here.

For Scala projects, the examples are available here.

Running the Server

After the configuration has been successfully initialized (see here), boot up the server(s) as following,

In Java & Scala projects,

Server.bootUp(config);

This will load the different entities mentioned in the configuration like Application information, Service Registry, Protocols and Services. To await the server(s) till they are given an explicit termination signal, do,

In Java & Scala projects,

Server.await();

Advanced Topics

You can head over to the Wiki for more advanced topics like,

• Configuring Authentication
• Configuring the Server
• Configuring the Externals
• Service Discovery & Load Balancing
• Implementing Custom externals

Contributing

I'm interested in building a community and would welcome any thoughts, suggestions and/ or patches. You can reach me @here.

License

Copyright 2020 Chitral Verma

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0