Antorc

Antorc is a lightweight communication bridge between a frontend application and a backend application.

It is not a web framework. It does not replace Flask, Django, or FastAPI. It does one small thing well: it lets a frontend send structured data to a backend, and lets a backend respond, without either side dealing with raw HTTP requests, sockets, or JSON serialization by hand.

• ✅ Zero third-party dependencies (pure Python standard library)
• ✅ Simple, Flask-like API
• ✅ Full type hints
• ✅ Clear, catchable exceptions
• ✅ Small enough to read in one sitting

Install

pip install antorc

(For local development, see Development below.)

Quick start

1. Write a backend

# backend.py
from antorc import AntorcServer

server = AntorcServer()

@server.route("/user")
def user(data: dict) -> dict:
    name = data.get("name", "stranger")
    return {"status": "ok", "message": f"Hello, {name}!"}

server.run()  # starts listening on http://127.0.0.1:8000

2. Write a frontend / client

# frontend.py
from antorc import AntorcClient

client = AntorcClient("http://127.0.0.1:8000")

response = client.send(endpoint="user", data={"name": "John"})
print(response)  # {'status': 'ok', 'message': 'Hello, John!'}

That's it. Run backend.py, then run frontend.py in another terminal.

Core concepts

Antorc has exactly four things to learn:

AntorcClient

The frontend-side object. It sends a dict of data to a named endpoint and returns the backend's dict response.

client = AntorcClient("http://127.0.0.1:8000", timeout=10.0)
response = client.send(endpoint="user", data={"name": "John"})

AntorcServer

The backend-side object. Register a function per endpoint with @server.route(...). Every handler receives a dict and must return a dict (or None).

server = AntorcServer()

@server.route("/user")
def user(data: dict) -> dict:
    return {"status": "ok"}

server.run(host="127.0.0.1", port=8000)

AntorcMessage

An optional helper for structuring and serializing {endpoint, data} pairs yourself, if you need to store or log messages instead of sending them immediately.

from antorc import AntorcMessage

message = AntorcMessage(endpoint="user", data={"name": "John"})
raw = message.to_json()
restored = AntorcMessage.from_json(raw)

Exceptions

Every error Antorc raises inherits from AntorcError, so you can catch broadly or specifically:

from antorc import AntorcClient, AntorcError, AntorcTimeoutError

client = AntorcClient("http://127.0.0.1:8000")

try:
    client.send("user", {"name": "John"})
except AntorcTimeoutError:
    print("The backend took too long to respond.")
except AntorcError as exc:
    print(f"Something went wrong: {exc}")

What Antorc is not

To keep it simple and focused, Antorc intentionally does not include:

• A database or ORM
• An authentication/session system
• HTML templating
• Frontend build tooling
• WebSockets or streaming (may be considered in a future major version)

If you need any of the above, pair Antorc with a real framework — that's exactly what it's designed to sit alongside.

Development

git clone https://github.com/yourname/antorc.git
cd antorc
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

License

MIT