Storm

Storm is a library for user-oriented configuration. Using Storm, developers can easily create type-safe systems for working with text-based configurations, especially for non-technical users.

• Discord: Development discussion & support

Features

• Navigable node hierarchy with no implicit behavior
• Type-safe serialization system including object mapping
• Custom configuration format and online editor support
• Extensions for JSON, HOCON, YAML, and XML
• Well documented, specified, and SemVer compatible APIs
• Complete test coverage over the API and implementation

Motivation

The majority of design decisions in Storm are based on experiences working with HOCON as well as non-technical users. The following are some of the primary issues that caused confusion for users (and developers), many of which can be avoided.

• Only \n is allowed for newlines. Files encoded with \r (MacOS) often result in cryptic error messages which is difficult to debug unless known.
• The top-level value must be an object ({...}), which means HOCON is not strictly compatible with JSON though it intends to be a JSON superset.
• The order of object properties is not maintained, thus re-serialization often scrambles the config making it difficult to keep a logical ordering.
• Values are coerced between types, such as:
  • "true", "on", and "yes" all becoming the boolean true
  • 3.5 and "3" becoming the integer 3 and the doubles 3.5 and 3.0
  • Objects containing any numeric key coercing to a list, excluding non-numeric keys entirely.

Development Progress

Development is currently focused on finalizing the serialization system, particularly with edge cases that just keep getting in the way :/.

If you're interested in contributing, feel free to join the project Discord.