minijinja VS actix-web

MiniJinja v1 - Templating engine

An authentication system is an integral part of modern applications. It's so important that almost all modern applications have some sort of it. Because of their critical nature, such systems should be secure and should follow OWAP®'s recommendations on web security and password hashing as well as storage to prevent attacks such as Preimage and Dictionary attacks (common to SHA algorithms). To demonstrate some of the recommendations, we'll be building a robust session-based authentication system in Rust and a complementary frontend application. For this article series, we'll be using Rust's actix-web and some awesome crates for the backend service. SvelteKit will be used for the frontend. It should be noted however that what we'll be building is largely framework agnostic. As a result, you can decide to opt for axum, rocket, warp or any other rust's web framework for the backend and react, vue or any other javascript framework for the frontend. You can even use rust's yew, seed or some templating engines such as MiniJinja or tera at the frontend. It's entirely up to you. Our focus will be more on the concepts.

I worked on a side project (currently with about 30-50 regular real users) using Rust (with axum), sqlite for the database, minijinja for template rendering, and htmx for the frontend interactivity and S3 for backups. It was quick to hack together (who says Rust is bad for prototyping?), and yet I still feel happy about the code quality. It's been running for a while now in production on fly.io free tier, I noticed it's apparently been using a steady 12MB of RAM, and zero errors or production issues so far since its inception. Last night I decided randomly to benchmark it on my laptop, it can handle 4000+ requests per second hitting the database with a bunch of data inside, I have put almost no effort into optimization. I feel like this might be a good result? Perhaps approaches like this will catch on? Something about this feels pretty cool! Has anyone else had this experience using Rust? I can think of multiple applications (in cluster of microservices) I've come across during my day jobs with large AWS bills and much higher incidental complexity that I would probably choose to do differently given this experience if I had the chance.

Jinja2 vs minijinja-py: not a rewrite per se tho https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja/tree/main/minijinja-py

Thanks to PyO3 and maturin I was able to make pretty decent Python bindings for MiniJinja, which is a Rust reimplementation of most of Jinja2. This in a way is now full circle.

Ronacher has ported jinja2 (partially) to Rust

https://github.com/mitsuhiko/minijinja

If you wan't to know why I even dove down into this Rabbit hole: I wanted to enable borrowing for filter functions in MiniJinja. The PR has more context

Hello, I am developing a CLI program for rendering template files using the new MiniJinja library by /u/mitsuhiko.

github repo

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