Book Image

Rust Web Programming - Second Edition

By : Maxwell Flitton
Book Image

Rust Web Programming - Second Edition

By: Maxwell Flitton

Overview of this book

Are safety and high performance a big concern for you while developing web applications? With this practical Rust book, you’ll discover how you can implement Rust on the web to achieve the desired performance and security as you learn techniques and tooling to build fully operational web apps. In this second edition, you’ll get hands-on with implementing emerging Rust web frameworks, including Actix, Rocket, and Hyper. It also features HTTPS configuration on AWS when deploying a web application and introduces you to Terraform for automating the building of web infrastructure on AWS. What’s more, this edition also covers advanced async topics. Built on the Tokio async runtime, this explores TCP and framing, implementing async systems with the actor framework, and queuing tasks on Redis to be consumed by a number of worker nodes. Finally, you’ll go over best practices for packaging Rust servers in distroless Rust Docker images with database drivers, so your servers are a total size of 50Mb each. By the end of this book, you’ll have confidence in your skills to build robust, functional, and scalable web applications from scratch.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Getting Started with Rust Web Development
4
Part 2:Processing Data and Managing Displays
8
Part 3:Data Persistence
12
Part 4:Testing and Deployment
16
Part 5:Making Our Projects Flexible
19
Part 6:Exploring Protocol Programming and Async Concepts with Low-Level Network Applications

Understanding asynchronous programming

Up until this chapter, we have been writing code in a sequential manner. This is good enough for standard scripts. However, in web development, asynchronous programming is important, as there are multiple requests to servers, and API calls introduce idle time. In some other languages, such as Python, we can build web servers without touching any asynchronous concepts. While asynchronous concepts are utilized in these web frameworks, the implementation is defined under the hood. This is also true for the Rust framework Rocket. However, as we have seen, it is directly implemented in Actix Web.

When it comes to utilizing asynchronous code, there are two main concepts we must understand:

  • Processes: A process is a program that is being executed. It has its own memory stack, registers for variables, and code.
  • Threads: A thread is a lightweight process that is managed independently by a scheduler. However, it does share data, code,...