About Hyperscala

What is Hyperscala?

Hyperscala is a statically typed bare-metal HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for Scala. What does that mean? It means you can write web pages in Scala entirely without markup. Hyperscala, unlike many frameworks in the web framework arena, is at its core a bare-metal framework. This means that we've done our best to perfectly represent HTML, CSS, and JavaScript so that there is nothing that can be done in a webpage that cannot be replicated in Hyperscala.

What if I already have HTML?

Great question! The goal of Hyperscala is to make web development easier and the honest truth is that sometimes it's just easier to write markup or you already have HTML you'd like to use. That's okay, we understand and we've created a lot of ways to make use of existing HTML. The first option is just to plug it in. You can use the StaticHTML class to inject a snippet of HTML code into your page as-is without any changes. This can be problematic though because rarely do you need to just work with static content, you need to modify it. To that end there are two other ways you can interact with the existing HTML. The first option is to convert it to Scala. We've provided a utility that can take any existing HTML file and convert it to Scala source code utilizing Hyperscala. This is great when you are porting over and the developer will be maintaining layout and design going forward. Unfortunately, this does not take into account the separation of developer and designer. Good luck trying to convince your web designer to learn Scala. This is where the second option comes in. Through the use of DynamicContent you can pull in snippets of HTML (similarly to StaticHTML), but extract elements out by id and modify and introspect them to your hearts content. Though it would seem like this would be incredibly slow, it's actually optimized to the extent that in most cases it performs faster than any other option. It's sort of like a dynamically regenerating JSP file that only deals with the dynamic parts.

Isn't HTML a pain?

Yes, we sure think so. Though at Hyperscala's core it is nothing more than a statically typed Scala framework that lets you write HTML there's so much more to it. We started with the core because we don't want to make assumptions of how people will use the framework. However, we've provided a lot of features on top that allow developers a much easier and abstract way of creating and manipulating web pages. One of the core features is the idea of Modules. In Hyperscala a module can be "required" by a page or component and will be loaded to provide some functionality into the page. For example, there are simple modules that inject JavaScript dependencies like jQuery (while avoiding multiple versions or includes from occurring) and other more advanced features like Realtime that allows two-way realtime communication via WebSockets (failing down to AJAX polling) for your page. Creating your own module is simple and allows libraries to be written and utilized without the idea of using them overly complicated. There's so much more that Hyperscala provides, check out the documentation for more information.