Rouille, Rust web server middleware VS actix-web

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 ?

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