actix-web VS sea-orm

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

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