assemblylift VS handlebars-rust

AssemblyLift is an open platform for cloud-native application development. AssemblyLift provides a portable, function-oriented framework and WebAssembly-based runtime which can be deployed to AWS Lambda or Kubernetes. The AssemblyLift CLI generates HashiCorp Terraform infrastructure code from simple TOML definitions, and takes care of compiling and packaging functions and services for deployment. To make a clichéd comparison, think of it as Infrastructure on Rails 😛

Since our last post introducing the AssemblyLift v0.4-alpha series, we've had two new alpha releases which introduced some major additions & improvements!

Today we're making available the first alpha release of AssemblyLift v0.4. This initial release brings a few exiting improvements to AssemblyLift including

After nearly two years in part-time development, AssemblyLift has been through three major revisions, sitting now at v0.3.2.

In this guide we'll use AssemblyLift to deploy our Lambda function, and define our API and an authorizer. AssemblyLift is an open platform which allows you to quickly develop high-performance serverless applications. Service functions are written in the Rust programming language and compiled to WebAssembly. The AssemblyLift CLI takes care of compiling and deploying your code, as well as building and deploying all the needed infrastructure!

Normally what we've described above would be a pretty complicated set up (and a much longer article 😜). Luckily we can use AssemblyLift to do all the heavy work for us!

This article will walk through building and deploying a simple static site, served using AWS Lambda and API Gateway. To accomplish this we will use AssemblyLift, an open-source platform designed to quickly & easily accomplish such a task.

If you've never heard of it or just need a reminder, AssemblyLift is an open platform for developing cloud-native applications. At its core are the AssemblyLift Runtime and the AssemblyLift CLI. The runtime provides an environment for executing compiled WebAssembly (WASM) on infrastructure such as AWS Lambda, and is one of the more unique aspects of the platform which we'll dig into more below.

Service TOML definitions now support specifying authorizers by ID for each function. These map to API Gateway authorizers; currently only IAM and JWT are supported. See the pull request for examples.

handlebars to create the HTML templates of all the built-in components

handlebars-rust, based on Handlebars

Handlebars/guide/#what-is-handlebars)

filling out templates inside files using Handlerbars

Would Handlebars-Rust be good for parsing non-Rust files? Or is there another templating engine built in Rust that I should use?

I am learning Rust currently, so to improve my skills, I am considering using its Handlebars implementation.

If you paid attention to the function code above, it might have occurred to you that the assets we serve don't have to be completely static. For example we could instead embed a handlebars template or similar & render it with the handlebars crate, allowing us "semi-dynamic" content for lack of a better name.

Tera is a templating engine, inspired by Jinja2 and Django. There are other options like handlerbars and askama, but in this case I prefer to use tera because I'm familiarized with the syntax.

This weekend I learned some unfamiliar behaviors with the way Handlebars handles nested variable scopes. I typically use Handlebars via the handlebars-rust implementation which aims to maintain nearly one to one compatibility with the JavaScript implementation. They have block scope helpers such as #each and #with, both of which create an inner scope for variable resolution. Unfortunately, the syntax can be quite unintuitive for accessing outer scope once in those nested scopes.

I have been tweaking and fixing issues with newline stripping feature for handlebars: https://github.com/sunng87/handlebars-rust/pull/448/files