Build Status
| Windows | Linux |
|---|---|
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Nano is a .NET cross-platform micro web framework for building web-based HTTP services and websites.
- Rapidly create web apis by writing static methods
- Low ceremony so that you can focus on business logic and not infrastructure and framework hassles
- Auto generated web interfaces for invoking your web apis ( Api Explorer )
- Self-host in an executable or integrate into a new or existing ASP.NET application with ease
- It can be used as a C# single file drop in or referenced as a NuGet Package.
Note: This project in currently in beta. The API has stabilized and we have not had to make a breaking change in quite some time. We will continue to add new features while in beta and are essentially just waiting for 4 different projects in flight to come out of development and into production use in order to make a determination of when we will declare version 1.0, meaning it is production certified and ready for widespread use for the masses.
Live demo hosted on AppHarbor: Nano ApiExplorer Demo
Opinions
Nano is a framework for building static websites and web apis and is optimized for developer productivity. With any framework ever written, it comes with set of opinionated ways of building software. The first opinion is that developers shouldn't have to worry about the transport protocol of HTTP for the majority of cases. We feel that in general developers just want to invoke a method to do work or get data and be on their merry way when both writing or consuming web-based services and apis. They don't want to have to worry about ports, tcp, serialization, connection timeouts, reading api specs, etc. So Nano is built with that in mind and at it's core allows developers to just write static methods and have the framework handle all of the HTTP stuff.
Nano brings some very valuable features that rival many other web frameworks including:
- Extension points/events/hooks for intercepting the request, response, or errors in order to implement logging, authentication, authorization, etc.
- Auto-generated web interface which can serve as documentation, a test playground, a "free" UI that you can give to users to invoke methods on your service, code proxy generation allowing your users to bypass NuGet and instead get proxy libraries directly from the source, etc.
- Ability for API creators to have their static methods automatically be exposed as JSON endpoints at a convention based url.. 'as fast as you can write a method is as fast as you can have an api'.
- Ability to go low level by using the NanoContext class in the instance that you need to control content type, return blobs, handles headers or cookies, etc.
MIT