Curveball - a TypeScript micro-framework

I’ve been doing Node.js development for a little while, and I wanted to try my hand at writing a framework. It’s probably a rite of passage to do this, although it’s not really my first.

By releasing it today, I want to see if this is worth investing time in in the future, or if I should focus my energy elsewhere.

The project is called Curveball, and these are it’s differentiating features:

Project goals

I’m a big fan of micro-frameworks. Express was great when it came out, but it now feels a little dated. Koa was written by the team behind express. Koa makes a lot more sense in codebases that are Promise-, rather than callback-oriented, and that’s not the only improvement. The team waited with releasing a stable version, until the very moment Node.js released a stable async/await support.

I would recommend everyone to check it out. I doubt you’ll want to go back to Express after using Koa for a bit.

Koa has been my framework of choice for a while, but there were a few things I would have liked. I thought it would be an interesting to to write something that checks those boxes.

1. Curveball is a very minimal, like Koa.
2. It largely follows Koa architecture and API design, with some subtle changes. Middlewares will look very familiar.
3. It’s completely written in Typescript.
4. It embraces modern HTTP features, it has built-in support for HTTP/2 Push, and 103 Early Hints and integrates these in a way that feel like they are a native part of the framework.
5. It’s easy to do ‘mock’ HTTP requests inside the framework, without having to go through a real HTTP stack.

Points 3-5 are something I missed from other frameworks I’ve looked at, and why I think it might be useful to others.

Some examples:

Hello world

import { Application, Context } from '@curveball/core';

const app = new Application();
app.use((ctx: Context) => {

ctx.response.body = 'Hello world! You used the following HTTP method: '  + ctx.request.method;

});
app.listen(4000);

A router

import { Application } from '@curveball/core';
import router from '@curveball/router';

app.use(router('/contact', ctx => {

ctx.response.body = 'Contact us!';

});
app.listen(4000);

HTTP/2 Push

Whenever you have access to the Context object, you can also push. Push will be ignored for HTTP/1 connectinons.

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