What is Encore?

Encore is a platform for rapid development of cloud-based backend applications — built for teams that prioritize building better products faster than ever before.

Modern software development has increasingly become a matter of taking standard tools and gluing them together. This is great since it is much faster than building it all from scratch, but it’s also large amounts of repetitive, undifferentiated work. With Encore all of that is taken care of, so that you can focus on what makes your product unique.

How does Encore work?

Encore is based heavily on static analysis, where we analyze the source code of the application to understand what the code is doing. We then take that understanding and automate many aspects of the software development process.

What makes Encore unique is that we automate much more than what has previously been possible. When you write your backend using Encore, we automate many aspects of your infrastructure:

• Building & deploying
• Setting up testing & production environments
• Creating, managing, and connecting to databases
• Generating API documentation
• … and more to come.

These features work across all of your environments: from local development to production.

A new way to build software

When writing software without Encore, you have to be explicit about even the most minute details, costing you valuable time that is better spent building your product. With Encore, you move up the stack to a higher abstraction level: the code you write expresses what you want to do, not /how/ to do it:

• Calling another API looks like a regular function call, but gets compiled to a regular HTTP/gRPC request. And you get compile-time errors if you get the API wrong!
• To query an SQL database, simply import the sqldb package. Encore takes care of setting up the database and connnecting to it.
• To create a new backend service, just create a new package. And an API endpoint is just a regular function. Encore sets all of this up, and generates API documentation along the way.

Encore knows exactly when you are trying to call another service’s API endpoint, and translates it into a regular network request. In this way you get all the benefits of a service-oriented architecture without the boilerplate that usually comes along with it.

Demo

Visit the Encore Playground to see an interactive demo of how easy it is to build backends with Encore.