Finch: Your REST API as a Monad

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It's well known and widely adopted in Finagle that "Your Server as a Function" uses Request => Response. In a REST API setting this function may be viewed as Request =1=> (A =2=> B) =3=> Response, where transformation 1 is request decoding (deserialization), transformation 2 -is business logic and transformation, and transformation 3 is- response encoding (serialization).

The only interesting part here is transformation 2 (i.e., A => B). Since it's usually a challenge to deal with pure functions in real-world problems, we wrap this into a monad M[_], so that a transformation (i.e, map, flatMap) M[A] => M[B] encodes the business logic of a REST API server.

This and other ideas are implemented in Finch, a purely-functional library for building composable REST APIs on top of Finagle.

Read about Your Server as a Function here.

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