// the find
scalatra/scalatra
Tiny Scala high-performance, async web framework, inspired by Sinatra
Scalatra is a Sinatra-style micro web framework for Scala, built directly on the Servlet API and Jetty. It's aimed at teams who want a lightweight, unopinionated router without the reactive/effect-system baggage of http4s or ZIO HTTP — or who are running in a traditional servlet container and want to stay there.
Genuinely modular — auth (Scentry), JSON (Jackson/json4s), forms, metrics, and caching are all separate artifacts you opt into rather than a monolith. It cross-builds against both javax and jakarta servlet APIs via separate source sets, which matters if you're stuck migrating an older container. The codebase has a real production history and every module carries its own spec/test suite, not just the core. CI is still green and the last push was three days ago, so it's not abandoned.
Routing is synchronous by default; async is bolted on through FutureSupport rather than being the baseline model, which feels dated next to cats-effect or ZIO-based frameworks. The README is a single hello-world block — you're sent straight to an external Guides site for anything real, so the repo alone doesn't tell you much about the API. Community channels are Gitter and IRC on freenode, which reads as a framework that peaked a while ago even though commits continue. Being servlet/Jetty-bound also means you inherit WAR-style deployment assumptions that most of the current Scala ecosystem has moved past.