Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By : Abhishek Chanda
Book Image

Network Programming with Rust

By: Abhishek Chanda

Overview of this book

Rust is low-level enough to provide fine-grained control over memory while providing safety through compile-time validation. This makes it uniquely suitable for writing low-level networking applications. This book is divided into three main parts that will take you on an exciting journey of building a fully functional web server. The book starts with a solid introduction to Rust and essential networking concepts. This will lay a foundation for, and set the tone of, the entire book. In the second part, we will take an in-depth look at using Rust for networking software. From client-server networking using sockets to IPv4/v6, DNS, TCP, UDP, you will also learn about serializing and deserializing data using serde. The book shows how to communicate with REST servers over HTTP. The final part of the book discusses asynchronous network programming using the Tokio stack. Given the importance of security for modern systems, you will see how Rust supports common primitives such as TLS and public-key cryptography. After reading this book, you will be more than confident enough to use Rust to build effective networking software
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we built upon what we studied previously. In essence, we moved the network stack up to the application layer. We studied some major considerations for building application layer protocols. We then looked at RPC, and in particular, gRPC, studying how it enables developers to build large-scale networked services. We then looked at a Rust crate that can be used to send emails via an SMTP server. The last few examples were on writing an FTP client and a TFTP server. Along with other application layer protocols covered elsewhere in this book, we should have a good standing in understanding these protocols.

HTTP is one text-based application layer protocol that deserves a chapter of its own. In the next chapter, we will take a closer look at it and write some code to make it work.