Welcome to Oxygen.jl Discussions!

[ndortega]

👋 Welcome!

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[HiperMaximus]

I think a good roadmap for Oxygen would be feature-parity with FastAPI from Python, one of the better Frameworks I've used and in my experience probably the easiest to pickup because of it's documentation and automatic documentation generation of the APIs

[ndortega]

I agree, that would definitely be a good place to start. Just in case you missed it, I just released v1.0.5 which added auto-generated documentation for each registered endpoint. It's pretty basic at the moment, it just handles paths, parameters, and some response types. But its a good start

[HiperMaximus]

It would be good to have a simple tutorial, for beginners

[ndortega]

Sure, what kind of tutorial were you thinking of? Any specific set of topics you'd think people would find helpful?
Would something like blog post that walks you through how to build a simple weather app or a todo-list application be good?

[HiperMaximus]

Both of them are good ideas, ideally, if the road is going for something like FastAPI, then copying its tutorial would be pretty amazing. Not assuming much knowledge of Julia or web develpment in general would be good as it would attract a wider userbase+I think most Julia users aren't in the web-develpment side of things, so it would be helpful there too. Also adding a comparison with other frameworks might encourage adoption, e.g. speed, ergonomics, integration, goals, etc.

[ndortega]

I just took a look at their tutorial section and I agree. It has a nice blend of "here's how the web works" and here's how you can easily do these things with FastApi. For now, I'm thinking of focusing on making that tutorial rather than building out some sample apps. (Feel free to contribute some demo apps if you want)

Thanks for the suggestion, that's a really good point. I've been adding a lot of features over the past month and I can see how beginners would be intimidated by a massive README.md

[jiachengzhang1]

Great package!

Critical features for me are authentication, session, database related, frontend template (Mustache.jl) etc, they are quite standard for web servers nowadays. Some benchmark and performance measures are good to have too

Some ideas on auto-generated documentation. IMO to improve usability, capture the routing and model information when the routes are created, similar to how FastAPI generates the swagger. e.g.

mutable struct Book <: Model
    name::Field = Field(type="", descripton="", ...) 
    ...
end

@get "/book" function(book::Book)
    # handle book
end

An OpenAPI spec is generated automatically based on those, but this may require changes within Oxygen.jl, so it could be a rabbit hole while you have a solution already but nice to have.

[HiperMaximus]

It's not necessary that you tie yourself with some packages, but it'll be nice to have examples with different packages, for example with Octo.jl for database management.

[HiperMaximus]

Also it would be nice to have examples with some Graphql libraries and how to do OAuth2/OpenID

[jiachengzhang1]

I agree, examples and tutorials would be awesome. I'd like to contribute if you need help.

Another idea to make Oxygen "unique" comparing to other Julia web frameworks, is to add some kind of middleware chaining like express.js, I found it useful sometime. Mux.jl has stack but it's not the cleanest. It could look like,

auth_handler = function(req, res) ... end
validation_handler = function(req, res) ... end
find_book = function(req, res) ... end

@get "/book" [auth_handler, validation_handler, find_book]

If you look for OAuth2, I have been working on Umbrella.jl to aid integrating OAuth2 servers like Google, GitHub and Facebook, feel free to steal the example there 😃

[ndortega]

@jiachengzhang1
I'll gladly take you up on that offer! Creating examples and documentation takes a lot of effort and would help me out considerably. By the way, Umbrella.jl looks awesome and I'll gladly steal your example for the docs. I'm currently working on the documentation, so I'll make sure to add a section just for this (feel free to open a PR to change it up)

Regarding the second point about adding chained middleware: we won't have to implement that. The latest changes in the HTTP.jl 1.0.0 release did some major refactoring and follows that pattern but still draws the distinction between handlers vs middleware. This will be available once I upgrade the framework, which will require some work from my end since a bunch of things have changed since then.

[HiperMaximus]

Really excited to see those changes!