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

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 have to 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 with other...