Catalytic VS sea-orm

After years of working, I finally completed Beezle Social, discover local events!

Beezle Social is an app that is ready to be downloaded on the App Store and possibly soon on the Play store as well! With Beezle, you can explore events happening nearby. Check out the website at https://beezleapp.com/. The app can be downloaded at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beezle-social/id1661982809. I completed this on my own.

Rust is used at the backend. I did choose Rust because of its safety and speed. I took me awhile to get used to the type-system, but after that, I was amazed by the functionality and ecosystem. It is a joy working with macro's, cargo and code quality of other libraries.

Swift is used at the frontend. Obviously I preferred Swift over Obj-c. I used SwiftUI + UIKit to make the UI. The whole chatting part is done with UIKit because SwiftUI does not support advanced text editing options. I used some hacks in the chatting part to make sure SwiftUI doesn't reload everything all the time when a new message comes in.

AWS is used at the deploying side. I used ECS and Docker to deploy the server and a lot of other services for media, CDN and mailing system.

Beezle used libraries I created: https://github.com/Jasperav/Catalytic and https://github.com/Jasperav/GRDB-ORM. Catalytic is an ORM for the scylla-rust-driver and GRDB-ORM an ORM for GRDB.

I am happy to answer any question! Please download the app, leave a review and ping me if you missing features.

The Cargo.lock file: https://github.com/Jasperav/Catalytic/blob/versions/Cargo.lock

SQL with SeaORM:

Haven't used it myself, but https://github.com/SeaQL/sea-orm seems to be popular in some communities and async

sea-orm

SeaORM has an Actix example in their GitHub. https://github.com/SeaQL/sea-orm/tree/master/examples/actix_example

SeaORM or the underlying SQLx query builder for SQL handling.

SeaORM is the most advanced ORM currently available, but a lot of people prefer to just skip ORMing and go direct to the underlying SQLx query builder.

If you want to do backend development, give actix-web or Axum a try. If you need templating, take a look at Maud and if you want an ORM, take a look at SeaORM.

SeaORM is the most advanced option right now (though a lot of people prefer to go direct to the underlying SQLx library) but it doesn't yet match Django ORM for offering auto-generation of draft database migrations, which is one of the things I'm unwilling to regress on. (i.e. so all I need to hand-edit is stuff like "that's a rename, not a remove+add" and so on)

Last I checked, authentication was weak. SeaORM is probably the most mature option if you're looking for an ORM like you'd find in another ecosystem (if you're willing to explore alternative designs, try using the underlying SQLx directly).

What I really like about it (apart from being a really nicely designed language, that is very expressive, powerful, performant and one of the safest because of the strict typing/memory management), is that you can kind of focus on just programming, without all the hassles around setting up a project, thinking about building/deploying etc. as tooling is really awesome as well (rust-analyzer, cargo, crates.io etc.). Libraries are usually high-quality and innovative (which is IMHO not so true for a lot of different other languages, including the ones you mentioned). E.g. if you want to create a web-server/API you could try something like this (my current recommendation): https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum and https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx for good integration of typed sql in Rust or if you want something higher level: https://github.com/SeaQL/sea-orm