Suave.IO

Async computation expressions and >=>

Suave WebParts use F# async computation expressions. For example you could write a time wasting WebPart like this:

let sleep milliseconds message: WebPart =
  fun (x : HttpContext) ->
    async {
      do! Async.Sleep milliseconds
      return! OK message x
    }

Async computation expressions are built into the F# language as a way of chaining asynchronous functions together. As well as do! and return! you can use let! to wait for another async function to return and then assign the result to a variable. For instance, let! result = anotherAsyncWorkflow. Behind the scenes “let!” is just syntactic sugar for calling the method builder.Bind on a computation builder.

In Suave we program by chaining functions of type WebPart.

type WebPart = HttpContext -> Async<HttpContext option>

Suave uses the >=> operator to chain WebParts together. In category theory this operation is known as a Kleisli composition. That is to say, >=> chains together Async options rather than just vanilla Async computations. If the result of the first of the two chained workflows is None, then the computation is short-circuited and the second computation is never run. If the first computation returns Some x, then >=> behaves in much the same way as let!: the result of running the expression on the left is passed into the expression on the right.

There is a good tutorial on using the >=> operator to short circuit a series of operations here: Railway oriented programming

There is also a good tutorial on computation expressions by the same author: Computation expressions: Introduction

Suave is a simple web development F# library providing a lightweight web server and a set of combinators to manipulate route flow and task composition.

Async computation expressions and >=>