Kemal is great, lightweight, fast!!! and I’m using it for a growing number of infrastructure / microservices at CircuitLab (exposing JSON APIs, mostly), as well as to serve web requests on my side project at Total Real returns.<p>If you want to play with Kemal and/or Crystal without installing anything besides Docker, I made <a href="https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/compumike/crystal-docker-quickstart</a> . You should be able to add Kemal to shard.yml, edit d_dev to expose port 3000 (there’s a line already there, just uncomment it), and get your first Kemal microservice up in a few minutes :)
Using a fez (or fes, if you prefer) as a logo for a "Fast, Effective, Simple" framework named "Kemal" is kind of unfortunate/ironic. Kemal Ataturk actually abolished the use of the fez [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Revolution" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Revolution</a>
HUGE fan of Kemal (and Crystal as a whole).<p>I started, as many do, with a full-featured batteries-included framework (Amber, which is also awesome and super easy to grok), but later realized that I much prefer being closer to the metal and Kemal is exactly that. You can build a fully-functional API in a single file with a few lines of code, and it works easily and quickly.
I've used it for a small API project, really easy to understand and setup!<p>There's also a healthy amount of ported gems (Shards) over at:<p><a href="https://crystalshards.org/shards" rel="nofollow">https://crystalshards.org/shards</a>