Welcome to NWheels

An ejectable way to develop and maintain software of any scale with tiny amount of code. Every layer and aspect is coded in a dedicated domain-specific language (DSL). The DSLs are transpiled into working codebases in selected languages and technology stacks, which look as if they were coded manually. Read full introduction.

CURRENT STATUS: incubation of v2. Field-tested v1 can be found in gen-1 branch.

Getting started

WARNING: we're in early alpha, expect failures

Prerequisites

Production

Development

• Machine running Linux, macOS, or Windows
• .NET Core SDK 2.1 or higher
• (Recommended) C# IDE. The popular ones are VSCode, Visual Studio (Windows only), Rider

Hello World

Create a minimalistic application that consists of a static web page saying "Hello World".

Step 2. Create project

1. Create a new class library project:

   $ mkdir hello-world
   $ cd hello-wolrd
   $ dotnet new classlib -f netstandard 2.0
   $ rm *.cs
   

2. Add necessary packages:

   $ dotnet add package NWheels.Build
   $ dotnet add package NWheels.UI.Model
   $ dotnet add package NWheels.UI.Adapters
   $ dotnet add package NWheels.DevOps.Model
   $ dotnet add package NWheels.DevOps.Adapters
   

3. Open the project in an editor or IDE of your choice. For example, to open the project in VSCode, run:

   $ code .
   

Step 2. Declare intents

1. We want to create a web page that displays "Hello, world"

   HelloPage.cs

   using NWheels.UI.Model;
   using NWheels.UI.Model.Web;
   
   namespace HelloWorld
   {
       class HelloPage : WebPage
       {
           TextContent Hello => "Hello, world!"
       }
   }

2. We want the page to be deployed as static HTML:

   HelloEnvironment.cs

   using NWheels.DevOps.Model;
   using NWheels.UI.Adapters.Web.StaticHtml;
   
   namespace HelloWorld
   {
       class HelloEnvironment : Environment<EmptyConfiguration>
       {
           StaticHtmlSite HelloSite => 
               new SinglePageWebApp<HelloPage>().AsStaticHtmlSite();
       }
   }

Step 3. Run locally

In the console, run:

$ dotnet start

If everything goes right, a browser will pop up displaying our web page with the "Hello, world!" text. The console output should state this:

Starting local environment: HelloEnvironment
Starting web server for SinglePageWebApp<HelloPage>
- listening at http://localhost:3000
Local environment is up. Press ^C to shut down...

DSLs and technology adapters

Below is the current list of supported DSLs, together with supported technology adapters.

Technology adapters that are links point to their source repos. Those which aren't links are planned, but the work hasn't yet started. The list of adapters will eventually be much larger.

DSL	Supported adapters	Planned next
UI	web/React+Redux	web/Angular ; mobile/ReactNative ; desktop/Electron
REST API	dotnet/ASP.NET Core	node/express
Domain	dotnet	node
Actors		dotnet/Akka.Net ; jvm/Akka
OxM	dotnet/MongoDB	dotnet/EFCore ; node/mongoose ; node/sequelize
DB	MongoDB	MySQL ; CosmosDB ; CloudStorage
MQ		Kafka
Distributed Cache		Redis
Authorization	dotnet	node
Testability	dotnet/NUnit	node/jest
Extensibility		dotnet ; web ; node
Customization		dotnet ; web ; node
I18n		dotnet ; web ; node
Monitoring	Elastic	TICK ; LogzIO ; Azure DevOps ; Google StackDriver
BI		Zoho Analytics ; Splunk
Deployment	Docker+Kubernetes
Microservices	dotnet	node
CI/CD	AppVeyor	CodeFresh