Jasper v0.9.9 is Released!

Jasper is an open source project I’ve been furiously working on for the past couple years as what I have to admit is mostly a chance to resurrect the best parts of the earlier FubuMVC framework while solving its technical and usability shortcomings. Along the way, Jasper has evolved a bit away from its FubuMVC roots to be more consistent and compatible with ASP.Net Core. At this point, Jasper is a fancy command execution pipeline that lives inside of the ASP.Net Core ecosystem. Jasper can be used as any mix of a lightweight messaging framework, an in-memory service bus, or handling HTTP requests as an alternative ASP.Net Core framework.

I was just able to push a new v0.9.9 release of Jasper that I want to effectively be the last alpha release. At this point, I think the public API surface is pretty well set and only a handful of features left before making the big ol’ 1.0 release. I think the most important thing for Jasper is to try to get folks to take it for a spin, or glance through tutorials, and generally try to get some feedback and visibility about the project.

Here’s some links to get you started:

• Jasper on GitHub
• Jasper on Gitter if you want to chat about Jasper
• Documentation Website
• Getting Started
• Jasper as an In Memory Command Executor / Mediator
• Using Jasper as a Lightweight Service Bus
• Building HTTP Services with Jasper
• Hybrid Jasper/MVC Core Application

There’ll hopefully be plenty of blog posts on Jasper in the next couple weeks, starting with how Jasper’s usability contrasts with MVC Core in the HTTP space or NServiceBus/MediatR/etc. for messaging and command execution.

The Road to 1.0

I’ve got to put Jasper down for awhile to focus on some Lamar and help out a lot more with Marten for probably a couple months before I do much more on Jasper, but I’d still love to get 1.0 out by at least the end of the summer.

I’m thinking out loud in this section, so everything is subject to change. Before I flip the switch to the big, giant 1.0, I think these things might need to happen:

• There are some optimizations I want to make to the database backed message persistence I couldn’t quite get to for v0.9.9.
• I’m very tempted just to wait until the netcoreapp3.0 wave of updates comes out. It’s a near guarantee that ASP.Net Core v3.0 will break some of Jasper’s internals, and it’d be very helpful to slim Jasper’s package dependency tree down if Jasper could depend on the new generic host model instead of IWebHostBuilder when 3.0 unifies that model somewhat.
• Jasper heavily depends on the Task Parallel Library from Microsoft, but that seems to be somewhat deprecated now. I might look to rewire Jasper’s internals to use the newer System.Threading.Channels instead. I haven’t done any research into this one yet.
• If the HTTP support is going to live on, it’ll need some kind of Swagger/Swashbuckle integration for the Jasper HTTP API support
• I’d like to spend some time on supporting the Techempower Benchmarks for Jasper and some performance optimization. My goal here is to make Jasper the fastest HTTP application framework for .Net Core and be just barely slower than the raw ASP.Net Core benchmarks (not sure how feasible that is, but let me dream on).
• Jasper is going to have to adjust to whatever becomes of Lamar. I don’t think this is going to change Jasper at development time, but might introduce a new production build step to optimize Jasper application’s “cold start” times for better hosting in Docker kind of worlds.