scala-ts.md

Comparison to scala-ts

scala-ts is another tool to generate typescript interfaces from your scala domain code. When we evaluated it for use, but encountered fundamental limitations making it unsuitable for use in our projects.

scala-ts is limited to the types it knows and case classes.

For example, the current version (0.4.0) cannot handle BigDecimal. If your domain contains a case class Foo(num: BigDecimal) you are out of luck with scala-ts. For built-in Java and Scala this can be expanded, but it will not work for your own types which aren't case classes or types that come from a library you depend on.

scala-ts only has a single way to generate case classes

Sometimes, you want to modify your JSON (de)serialization slightly. This is not possible with scala-ts, but scala-tsi can handle this.

Say you want to remove the password property of your User class in serialization:

case class User(name: String, password: String)

// Example play json writer
implicit val userSerializer = Json.writes[User].transform(jsobj => jsobj - "password")

This is not possible with scala-ts, but can be done in scala-tsi as follows:

import com.scalatsi.dsl._

implicit val userTsType = TSType.fromCaseClass[User] - "password"

However, this flexibility increases potential complexity

scala-tsi aims to work as simple and out-of-the-box as possible. Since version 0.2.0, by default you shouldn't need to specify anything yourself and scala-tsi works similar to scala-ts.

If you are stuck or encounter something that's more difficult than other tools, please open an issue!