Bowler - A RESTful, Multi-Channel ready Scala Web Framework with a functional flavor

A RESTful, multi-channel ready web framework in Scala with a functional flavour, built on top of Scalatra and Scalate, with Lift-JSON doing the heavy JSON lifting. The project is built with Simple Build Tool ("sbt")- we intend to further add custom sbt processors in the future to automate boilerplate tasks.

More documentation and setup details are available on the project website

Design Goals (some of them)

• RESTfulness - being true to RESTful principles and the intent of the HTTP protocol.
• Multi-Channel ready - the number of clients is increasing: desktop browsers, smartphones like Android & iPhone, tablets like the iPad, and API's for third parties. Bowler aims to ease targeting multiple platforms at once by maximizing re-use and minimising re-work while allowing Layouts and Templates to be selected based on User-Agent, domain and other criteria.
• JSON API "for free" - to ease creating dynamic websites with JQuery, or providing partners an API, the default settings give you a JSON API "for free", with JSON rendered to the client based on the View Model you've set and the HTTP "Accept" header being set to "application/json" from the client.
• Decomposition of the View into "Resource View" & Layout - A consequence and enabler of the above two points, a stricter separation between the Resource View representing the Model you want to display and the Layout you want to surround it with. The idea behind this is explained here: Decomposing the View in MVC - What's In a View?
• Sensible Defaults - Good to go out-of-the-box with sensible defaults and further extensions/plug-ins in the works for adding functionality.
• Composability - if you don't like the defaults, pick, choose and combine what you want. Bowler uses a "Micro Architecture" approach with strict code adherence to the Single Responsibility Principle. Adding for instance a different validation framework or different templating mechanism or even entirely different rendering mechanism should be relatively pain free.

Building Instructions

• Have sbt 0.7.5RC0 or later installed
• Pull and build the Recursivity Commons project, then do a "publish-local" on that project, as Bowler depends on this (we will make everything available in a Maven repo soon enough!)
• Go into the "core" folder, run sbt and the "update" command in sbt to download all dependencies
• Place the scala-compiler.jar in the "lib"-folder, this is a dependency of Scalate, and doesn't get automatically downloaded due to a bug in sbt.
• Now you're ready to build and go!