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

Introducing the Actix Web framework

At the time of writing this book, the Actix Web framework is the most popular Rust web framework due to the number of forks, watches, and contributors. It has an active community, good feature support, and impressive benchmark scores. The framework Rocket is not far behind in terms of popularity; however, it uses Rust nightly to run, which is less stable. For the rest of the book, we will be building our to-do app in Actix. However, introductions to the Rocket and Warp web frameworks will be covered in their own chapters at the end of the book.

The power of Rust is that it enables users to rapidly develop with high-level, memory-safe structs with low memory consumption and fast execution times. However, it also allows fine-grain control if needed. If a developer really wants to, they can deactivate the memory safety in Rust and continue to develop and run Rust programs (though it is not recommended). Rust's crates are no exception to this...