poem VS Rouille, Rust web server middleware

TypeSpec is great, but if you're working with Rust and you're about to write a new project that will require an OpenApi spec sooner or later, I'd like to recommend a web framework that has spec generation baked in:

https://github.com/poem-web/poem (see poem_openapi)

All you need to do is derive a trait on your response structs and in return you get an almost perfectly generated spec. Unions, objects, enums are first class citizens.

Also, if you're from coming from PHP, the controllers feel very much like symfony controllers.

P.s. Please do recommend an ORM that would feel closer to doctrine. I miss doctrine.

I've used FastAPI/Pydantic before as well and it was a very good experience. It has been a while since I used them though, so I forget exactly how they compare, but I do recall it wrote most of the OpenAPI spec. for you. I will also agree when I saw utoipa and aide they seemed to require more boilerplate even though I have not done an actual comparison. Poem, on the other hand, seems very neat and clean and doesn't have any duplication that I can see. Here is the [TODO example](https://github.com/poem-web/poem/blob/master/examples/openapi/todos/src/main.rs).

The example at https://github.com/poem-web/poem/tree/master/examples/openapi/auth-apikey works without issues for me.

'Poem', it turns to nicer to play with for me than 'Axum'. Example of web socket chat https://github.com/poem-web/poem/blob/master/examples/poem/websocket-chat/src/main.rs

If you need built-in OpenAPI support, I can recommend Poem.

If OpenAPI is important, then you may to consider https://github.com/poem-web/poem instead of axum. It isn't nearly as widely used, but it should still be compatible with everything else.

Poem: More rigid and less popular and aims to be easier https://github.com/poem-web/poem

Did you check out Poem? It seems promising, with openapi generation built in already.

https://github.com/poem-web/poem is a pretty nice framework

I recently been working with warp and stumbled upon poem framework (https://github.com/poem-web/poem), any thoughts about that? Considering Axum as well but staying a bit on cautionary side until 0.6 full release.

Your CRUD web application server almost certainly doesn't need async Rust. Using a blocking HTTP server is not "might be a good idea", it simply is a good idea.

I recommend Rouille for this: https://github.com/tomaka/rouille. In case you are worried about performance, check the benchmark. Blocking Rouille is faster than builtin async server in Node.js.

As you say, the majority of the web ecosystem in Rust has moved to async - but if you’re happy to stray a bit from the beaten path then rouille might do the trick.

In strongly typed languages like Rust, composing smaller libraries is usually quite painless, so you don't need a large framework.

Personally for backend Rust I use rouille[0] for the server (it's very simple and async-free), askama[1] for compile-time HTML templates and (if a SPA is unavoidable, as that is of course always to be avoided if at all possible) yew[2] for client-side WASM.

Now this stack is what I like personally, but there are many options that you can combine, some more full-featured than others. Check out https://www.arewewebyet.org/ for a partial overview.

[0]: https://github.com/tomaka/rouille

[1]: https://github.com/djc/askama

[2]: https://yew.rs/

rouille

I'd like to put in a word for a simple, sync framework such as rouille. The compile times are much, much better, the number of dependencies is much smaller, the stuff it's built on (the standard library) is extensively tested and extremely reliable. Kernel context switches are slower than userspace thread scheduling, but not much slower, and as long as your services aren't just shoving bytes from one place to another (i.e. actually doing some computation) the time taken for a context switch vanishes into noise. A lot of benchmarks test how quickly a web service can move bytes, which (if your business logic is non-trivial) actually isn't the most critical factor.

I don't have any Rust-relevant experience here, but if I wanted to build a web server in Rust and was okay with "reasonable" performance, I'd probably give rouille a try first.

Rouille is fairly solid in my experience. Save the pain of async and spend it building software that works. Honestly with Rust's lack of GC you get predictable response times already.

How would you differentiate it from let's say Rouille ?