Book Image

Rust Web Programming

By : Maxwell Flitton
Book Image

Rust Web Programming

By: Maxwell Flitton

Overview of this book

Are safety and high performance a big concern for you while developing web applications? While most programming languages have a safety or speed trade-off, Rust provides memory safety without using a garbage collector. This means that with its low memory footprint, you can build high-performance and secure web apps with relative ease. This book will take you through each stage of the web development process, showing you how to combine Rust and modern web development principles to build supercharged web apps. You'll start with an introduction to Rust and understand how to avoid common pitfalls when migrating from traditional dynamic programming languages. The book will show you how to structure Rust code for a project that spans multiple pages and modules. Next, you'll explore the Actix Web framework and get a basic web server up and running. As you advance, you'll learn how to process JSON requests and display data from the web app via HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You'll also be able to persist data and create RESTful services in Rust. Later, you'll build an automated deployment process for the app on an AWS EC2 instance and Docker Hub. Finally, you'll play around with some popular web frameworks in Rust and compare them. By the end of this Rust book, you'll be able to confidently create scalable and fast web applications with Rust.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1:Setting Up the Web App Structure
4
Section 2:Processing Data and Managing Displays
8
Section 3:Data Persistence
12
Section 4:Testing and Deployment

Running our application locally

So far, we have been running our application with the cargo run command. This has been working well, but you might have noticed that our application is not very fast. In fact, it is very slow when we try and log in to the application. This seems to be counterintuitive as we are learning Rust in order to develop faster applications.

So far, it does not look very fast. This is because we are not running an optimized version of our application. We can do this by adding the --release tag. As a result, we run our optimized application using the following command:

RUST_LOG="info,parser::expression=info,actix_web=info" 
cargo run --release

Here, we notice that the compilation takes a lot longer. Running this every time we alter the code, and during a development process, is not ideal. However, now that our optimized application is running, we can see that the login process is a lot faster. In order to achieve this, we follow these steps...