What is Rocket?
Rocket is a Rust web framework, like Actix web. It's newer than Actix web and has a lower user base at the time of writing this book. It also relies on nightly Rust, which is less stable. At the time of writing this book, it is at version 0.4, though stable Rust is to be supported in version 0.5, so this is not going to be a drawback for long. Because of its early stages, keeping all of Rocket's components updated can be tricky. This is because breaking changes are often introduced to early crates and frameworks.
However, the framework does have some advantages. Rocket is simpler to write, since its boilerplate code has been taken care of. It also supports JSON, forms, and type checking out of the box, which can be implemented with just a few lines of code.
Rocket also has easy to implement handlers and middleware components that do not require you to understand how requests feed through the process. Instead, we just have to implement a trait and function...