actix-web VS rweb

Actix Web Documentation: Detailed documentation on using Actix-web, including examples and best practices for building web applications with Rust.

I can't speak to the "is it any good" part, but (after a bit of research) I can share what I've found. I'll try to represent things as best as I understand, but I may have some finer details mixed up.

ntex is written by the same person that started actix-web, Nikolay Kim (fafhrd91 on GitHub). There was a bunch of drama a while back due to actix-web using (what many reasoned to be) avoidable unsafe code, which was later found to be buggy. Nikolay was pilloried online, resulting in him transferring leadership of actix-web to someone else. ntex is, as I understand it, essentially Nikolay picking back up on his ideals for what could have been actix-web, if people hadn't pushed him out of his own project.

How ntex compares to the pre-/post-leadership change of actix-web, I don't know.

Here are some jumping points if you want more of the backstory.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/rust_actix_web_framew...

https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust

https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289

Are you ready to embark on another journey in Rust? Today, we'll explore how to create a REST API that performs basic mathematical operations: addition, multiplication, and division. We'll use Actix, a powerful web framework for Rust, together with Rhai, a lightweight scripting language, to achieve our goal.

Within actix-web, middleware is used as a medium for being able to add general functionality to a (set of) route(s) by taking the request before the handler function runs, carrying out some operations, running the actual handler function itself and then the middleware does additional processing (if required). By default, actix-web has several default middlewares that we can use, including logging, path normalisation, access external services and modifying application state (through the ServiceRequest type).

Rust is a popular system programming language, known for its robust memory safety features and exceptional performance. While Rust was originally a system programming language, its application has evolved. Now you can see Rust in different app platforms, mobile apps, and of course, in web apps — both in the frontend and backend, with frameworks like Rocket, Axum, and Actix making it even easier to build web applications with Rust.

actix to handle HTTP requests

rweb is pretty simple. it's based on warp, but with rocket-like #[get("/product/{id}")] which is like Flask's @app.route("/product/").

I wrote a PR this weekend to give FastAPI like UX to rweb! https://github.com/kdy1/rweb/pull/56

This crate has an implementation for the Handler trait which I used to model my own Handler trait for an actix-web Service. Using my own struct which implemented that trait suddenly made the "this is not Send" error messages simple enough to decipher. I was able to get the thing to actually compile, but it required using a few unwrap()s on errors which were not Send. I could probably go back and figure out how to wrap or map those errors to something simpler to make my implementation less fragile, but I was already annoyed enough at this implementation that I was headed toward rweb anyway.

All of that is to say rweb is a possible solution, but not a likely one. The product seems great, and if the code functions as well as the brief examples indicate, this is the best option from a code perspective (oops, spoilers!). Given my concerns about the community, I would have to be comfortable forking and maintaining my own version of this framework in the event that I need changes and can't wait months for a PR to be reviewed. Even if that's not the case, I'll certainly have to write much more complete documentation for my teammates to be able to use this project effectively. I'm not mortally opposed to any of that, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.