Scintillate

A lightweight HTTP client and server for the Loom generation

Scintillate is a lightweight HTTP server for processing HTTP requests. It is designed primarily for Scala 3 and the optional server module provides an API for running standalone, or within a Servlet container, preferably on a Loom-based JVM.

Features

• immutable API optimized for Scala 3 and lightweight concurrency with Loom
• Simple and flexible request handling
• HTTP server can be run standalone or wrap a servlet container
• typesafe representations of HTTP request and response headers and MIME types
• transparent typeclass-based request body query parameter serialization and deserialization
• optional pattern-matching on requests
• fast streaming without complexity
• safe parameter and header access

Availability

Getting Started

TBC

Status

Scintillate is classified as fledgling. For reference, Soundness projects are categorized into one of the following five stability levels:

• embryonic: for experimental or demonstrative purposes only, without any guarantees of longevity
• fledgling: of proven utility, seeking contributions, but liable to significant redesigns
• maturescent: major design decisions broady settled, seeking probatory adoption and refinement
• dependable: production-ready, subject to controlled ongoing maintenance and enhancement; tagged as version 1.0.0 or later
• adamantine: proven, reliable and production-ready, with no further breaking changes ever anticipated

Projects at any stability level, even embryonic projects, can still be used, as long as caution is taken to avoid a mismatch between the project's stability level and the required stability and maintainability of your own project.

Scintillate is designed to be small. Its entire source code currently consists of 462 lines of code.

Building

Scintillate will ultimately be built by Fury, when it is published. In the meantime, two possibilities are offered, however they are acknowledged to be fragile, inadequately tested, and unsuitable for anything more than experimentation. They are provided only for the necessity of providing some answer to the question, "how can I try Scintillate?".

1. Copy the sources into your own project

   Read the fury file in the repository root to understand Scintillate's build structure, dependencies and source location; the file format should be short and quite intuitive. Copy the sources into a source directory in your own project, then repeat (recursively) for each of the dependencies.

   The sources are compiled against the latest nightly release of Scala 3. There should be no problem to compile the project together with all of its dependencies in a single compilation.

2. Build with Wrath

   Wrath is a bootstrapping script for building Scintillate and other projects in the absence of a fully-featured build tool. It is designed to read the fury file in the project directory, and produce a collection of JAR files which can be added to a classpath, by compiling the project and all of its dependencies, including the Scala compiler itself.

   Download the latest version of wrath, make it executable, and add it to your path, for example by copying it to /usr/local/bin/.

   Clone this repository inside an empty directory, so that the build can safely make clones of repositories it depends on as peers of scintillate. Run wrath -F in the repository root. This will download and compile the latest version of Scala, as well as all of Scintillate's dependencies.

   If the build was successful, the compiled JAR files can be found in the .wrath/dist directory.

Contributing

Contributors to Scintillate are welcome and encouraged. New contributors may like to look for issues marked beginner.

We suggest that all contributors read the Contributing Guide to make the process of contributing to Scintillate easier.

Please do not contact project maintainers privately with questions unless there is a good reason to keep them private. While it can be tempting to repsond to such questions, private answers cannot be shared with a wider audience, and it can result in duplication of effort.

Author

Scintillate was designed and developed by Jon Pretty, and commercial support and training on all aspects of Scala 3 is available from Propensive OÜ.

Name

To scintillate is "to fluoresce momentarily when struck by a charged particle", much as a web server is dormant until an incoming request stimulates a response.

In general, Soundness project names are always chosen with some rationale, however it is usually frivolous. Each name is chosen for more for its uniqueness and intrigue than its concision or catchiness, and there is no bias towards names with positive or "nice" meanings—since many of the libraries perform some quite unpleasant tasks.

Names should be English words, though many are obscure or archaic, and it should be noted how willingly English adopts foreign words. Names are generally of Greek or Latin origin, and have often arrived in English via a romance language.

Logo

The logo shows four interlocked three-pointed stars, intended to look like flying sparks or scintillations.

License

Scintillate is copyright © 2025 Jon Pretty & Propensive OÜ, and is made available under the Apache 2.0 License.