Rouille, Rust web server middleware VS Rocket

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 ?

4. Rocket

If you want something simpler/more minimal, you could use https://rocket.rs/ for the backend and handle the front-end however you want.

I’m the author of https://kellnr.io. When I started working on Kellnr three years ago, https://rocket.rs was “the web framework” to use. Unfortunately, the project seems dead. Before adding more functionality using an unmaintained framework, I want to port Kellnr to https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum.

Or else you could of course just use https://rocket.rs/

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.

I've done some research but I have to admit that creating embedded devices is a totally new subject for me, but that is the point of the project - main goal is learning, and creating something is the secondary goal, so please bear with me and my knowledge of the subject. So, for the hardware I've seen many people recommending SMT32 family devices, but I've also read that anything with the Cortex-M processor can be suitable. Need more info on that. OS is a hard choice for me because on one hand I was thinking of Ubuntu Core but the device support is not really that good I think, so other options I've found are Tock and RIOT-OS, and I am gravitating towards the latter because it's main focus is on IOT devices. I've found frameworks like Rocket.rs for a web app, tauri.app for desktop app (which might not be needed but I still like the idea). Also found Tokio.rs which apparently will help with the networking. There was a discussion from the other members about using the Golioth cloud platform with Zephyr and C++, and I don't know if there are any other alternatives for Golioth that support Rust, I've found webthings.io but I am not sure if it's an alternative, or something else actually, so I would be happy to learn more about that. Again I want to hear your recommendations regarding anything that will help creating a project like that.

I use Rocket on the backend with Postgres. Currently experimenting with Yew for the frontend.