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TesseraQLTesseraQL

What TesseraQL is

TesseraQL builds internal business applications: the screens, APIs, batch jobs, and integrations a company runs on. You write SQL and YAML; the framework supplies the runtime, the transactions, identity, scheduling, file transfer, observability, and three browser consoles.

It is aimed at teams who know their data and their business rules, and who would rather spend their effort there than on a front-end build pipeline.

The shape of an application

Section titled “The shape of an application”

An application is a directory you own, in your own repository:

web/orders/get.yml          the route:  GET /orders
web/orders/search.sql       its SQL, runnable as-is in any SQL client
web/orders/list.view.yml    the page, declared rather than written
db/migration/V1__orders.sql your schema, in plain SQL
tests/orders.yml            the suite, declared alongside

There is no generated code to regenerate, no ORM mapping to keep in step, and no JavaScript build. The SQL file you paste into your database client is the same file production runs.

What you get without building it

Section titled “What you get without building it”
Identity Local accounts, SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, roles, policies, sessions
Data protection Deny-by-default routes, row-level scoping, multi-tenancy, field masking
Writes Multi-statement transactions, declarative validation, optimistic locking, idempotent replay
Work Scheduled jobs, business-day calendars, chunked batch, polled file sources
Integration Managed HTTP and file connectors, messaging channels, a transactional outbox, webhooks
Output JSON, server-rendered HTML, CSV, Excel, PDF, HTML email
Evidence Declarative test suites with SQL coverage, an audit trail, Prometheus metrics, a generated per-app reference
Consoles Studio to author, operations to watch, IAM Admin for people

What it is not

Section titled “What it is not”

Being honest about this saves everyone time.

  • Not a general web framework. It is shaped for business applications over a relational database. A public marketing site or a real-time game is the wrong fit.
  • Not a single-page-application backend. Responses are server-rendered HTML with htmx, or JSON. If your front end is React and you want it to stay that way, you would use half the framework.
  • Not a low-code platform with a proprietary store. Everything is files in your repository, reviewed and deployed like any other code.
  • Not schema-managed. You write the migrations. The framework manages only its own tql_* tables.

Databases

Section titled “Databases”

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, with dialect-aware SQL resolution and per-dialect migrations. PostgreSQL needs no extra setup; the other drivers are opt-in because their licences differ (getting-started.md).

An embedded PostgreSQL is available for development, so a first run needs no database at all.

Where to start

Section titled “Where to start”
  • See it first — the five-minute demo boots a seeded application with Studio open, in one command.
  • Build something — getting started installs the CLI, then your first app walks from an empty directory to a tested feature.
  • Understand the model — concepts explains documents, recipes, and how a request travels.

Next

Section titled “Next”