Cav

Cav is a collection of powerful primitives for building full-stack web apps with Deno.

Status: Ready to play with, but not ready for production. The tests are currently outdated as of 0.2.0-alpha.*. Most will probably fail.

Guiding principles

• Least Astonishment
• Modular, maintainable server definitions
• No-fuss data serialization
• Automatic end-to-end typesafety
• Developer freedom
• Use The Platform

Docs

• Getting started
• Routers
• Endpoints
• Request parsing
• Response resolution
• Context
• Error handling
• Client fetch
• Assets
• Bundles
• Web sockets
• API

Examples

• Chat: Ephemeral real-time chat server

Goals

• It should come with everything a modern web server might need, without relying on third-party services (minus the database)
  • Routing
  • Static asset serving
  • Signed cookies and JWTs
  • Web sockets
  • Form and JSON parsing / validation
  • De/serialization of most data types, including Files, Dates, Maps, etc.
  • Runtime bundling for browser-side TypeScript
  • Works with frontend frameworks like Preact
• “Hello world” should be as easy as deno running a tiny server.ts
  • Zero config
  • Zero CLI commands
• The client-side API should use types imported from the server to fully type requests and responses
  • End-to-end typesafety
  • Compatible with Zod data parsers
• Its syntax should be functional and declarative, for maximal organization flexibility
  • Immutable, schema-like Router and Endpoint definitions
  • No hidden context
  • No middleware
• Production deployments should be a simple git-commit-push
  • Deno Deploy without a build step
• It should minimize the threat of supply chain attacks
  • Zero third-party dependencies

Inspirations

• Zod / tRPC
• Express / Koa / Oak
• superjson / devalue / json-dry

Cav’s description on GitHub is inspired by the Weird Wide Webring 🤙