Release Candidate 5

State of the Rewrite

A new Release Candidate is available due to a breaking change, in a few addons only :

• Jwt : Helper & Service
• BasicAuth : Helper & Service (this is a new nuget package and is no longer part of the core)
• OpenID : Helper & Service

Why?

Last week, I was finalizing the code and documentation for the release. I wanted to create a showcase for a common real-world use case: supporting multiple authentication schemes based on criteria like (host, IP, etc.).

When I tried to implement the example, the design turned out to be… ugly. A complete failure ! And not a small one.

The upcoming v26 must have solid, bulletproof foundations and be easily extensible.

At that point, releasing was not an option. Something had to change. So I took a step back and looked at how other frameworks handle this. The result:

• Handler attributes
• Authentication middleware

Thanks to this, my scenario is now handled in a clean, elegant, and powerful way. I’ll be shipping it in the templates NuGet package.

And there’s more : UseRouter(), UseEngine()

These two configuration methods allow you to easily override the Router and the Engine. Another building block for SimpleW’s extensibility.

I'm polishing the code a bit more and running tests, so I’ve postponed the release by another week. I don’t see any other parts of the code that require that level of rewriting, so I expect things to be calm. The release is planned for next week.

Read the updated documentation

feature / comparison

Feature / Aspect	SimpleW v16 (old)	SimpleW v26 (new)
NET runtime	NET8	NET8 but should consider NET9/NET10 for better perfs and RAM usage under heavy load (e.g: NET8 400Mo, NET9 100Mo, NET10 70Mo)
Core architecture	⚠️ (tied to NetCoreServer)	✅ from scratch (custom, simple, clean)
Code readability	⚠️	✅
Overall design philosophy	⚠️ wrapper	✅ minimal, custom, fast
Long-term maintainability	⚠️ harder	✅ much easier
Performance	✅ (very high)	✅ (very high)
Middleware	❌	✅
Modules	❌	✅
Extensibility	⚠️ (callback, subclass)	✅ middleware, module, callback, subclass
Response Builder	✅(status, contentType, headers, body, cookies)	✅ (status, contentType, contentLength, headers, body, cookies, compression)
Handler (Expression Tree)	✅ sync ❌async	✅ sync ✅ async + RequestAborted
Routing	✅ (minimal, attribute, querystring, regexp, path, wildcard)	✅ (minimal, attribute, querystring, path, wildcard, host)
Minimal API	✅	✅
Controllers	✅	✅
Custom attribute	❌	✅
SSL / HTTPS	✅ (SslContext)	✅ (SslContext, mutual authentication)
WebSocket	✅ (full broadcast)	✅ (smart broadcast using "rooms")
Server-Sent Events (SSE)	✅	✅ (smart broadcast using "rooms")
Unix socket	✅	✅
Static files	✅ (Cache, FileWatcher)	✅ (Cache, FileWatcher, Last-Modified, Etag)
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)	✅	✅
Body parsing (JSON)	✅	✅
Body parsing (form-urlencoded)	✅	✅
Body parsing (multipart/form-data)	✅	✅
Bag	❌	✅ (share data between middleware)
Auth	⚠️ custom IWebUser	✅ Principal / Identity
Custom JSON engine	✅	✅
HTTP pipelining	❌	✅
Content Range	❌	✅
Idle Timeout	❌	✅
Request Protection	❌	✅(malformed)
Observability	✅ (traces) & global to all processes	✅ (traces, metrics, enrich) per SimpleWServer instance
Logging	❌	✅
Documentation	✅	✅ simplew.net
Tests	✅	✅ (more tests)
Support	❌	✅ Discord
Addons	❌	✅ BasicAuth, Chaos, Firewall, Hosting, Jwt, Latency, Log4net, OpenID, Razor, Swagger, LetsEncrypt, Templates, Serilog, Log4net