Xitrum – async and clustered Scala web framework and HTTP(S) server

Last Updated on February 27, 2026

Xitrum is an async and clustered Scala web framework on top of Netty, Akka, and Hazelcast. It also has a fast built-in HTTP(S) server.

Xitrum tries to fill the spectrum between Scalatra and Lift: more powerful than Scalatra and easier to use than Lift. You can easily create both RESTful APIs and postbacks. Xitrum is controller-first like Scalatra, not view-first like Lift. Most people are familliar with controller-first style.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Typesafe, in the spirit of Scala. All the APIs try to be as typesafe as possible.
• Async, in the spirit of Netty. Your request proccessing action does not have to respond immediately. Long polling, chunked response (streaming), WebSocket, and SockJS are supported.
• Fast built-in HTTP and HTTPS web server based on Netty (HTTPS can use Java engine or native OpenSSL engine). Xitrum’s static file serving speed is similar to that of Nginx.
• Extensive client-side and server-side caching for faster responding. At the web server layer, small files are cached in memory, big files are sent using NIO’s zero copy. At the web framework layer you have can declare page, action, and object cache in the Rails style. All Google’s best practices like conditional GET are applied for client-side caching. You can also force browsers to always send request to server to revalidate cache before using.
• Range requests for static files. Serving movie files for smartphones requires this feature. You can pause/resume file download.
• CORS support.
• Routes are automatically collected in the spirit of JAX-RS and Rails Engines. You don’t have to declare all routes in a single place. Think of this feature as distributed routes. You can plug an app into another app. If you have a blog engine, you can package it as a JAR file, then you can put that JAR file into another app and that app automatically has blog feature! Routing is also two-way: you can recreate URLs (reverse routing) in a typesafe way. You can document routes using Swagger Doc.
• Classes and routes are automatically reloaded in development mode.
• Views can be written in a separate Scalate template file or Scala inline XML. Both are typesafe.
• Sessions can be stored in cookies (more scalable) or clustered Hazelcast (more secure). Hazelcast is recommended when using continuations-based Actions, since serialized continuations are usually too big to store in cookies. Hazelcast also gives in-process (thus faster and simpler to use) distribued cache and pubsub, you don’t need separate cache and pubsub servers.
• jQuery Validation is integrated for browser side and server side validation.
• i18n using GNU gettext. Translation text extraction is done automatically. You don’t have to manually mess with properties files. You can use powerful tools like Poedit for translating and merging translations. gettext is unlike most other solutions, both singular and plural forms are supported.

Website: xitrum-framework.github.io
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Ngoc Dao
License: MIT License

Xitrum is written in Scala. Learn Scala with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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