ureq VS surf

I also enjoyed using ureq as an http client.

After a quick check of the available rust http client libraries I opted for reqwest. It has a pretty simple API and it seems to be among the most used libraries for this matters. But I'm a bit concerned about all its dependencies so I might try ureq later.

Async is only useful when you have hundreds of connections open at the same time and idling most of the time; otherwise it's a liability. If your web API does not allow that (e.g. it has rate-limiting, which most APIs do), I suggest going with a client that performs blocking I/O and spawning threads if you need parallelism. https://github.com/algesten/ureq should fit the bill.

I think you'll find a lot of people claiming its overkill, but it will have excellent documentation for both sides, offer reasonable speed, and let you hash out the actual logic of your system without worrying too much about if your low-level implementation is correct. Two good frameworks for the server would be Actix or Rocket. For the client, i'd reccomend either using reqwest or ureq. From there, you can just set up a few POST endpoints, and get to going.

If you want an HTTP client with few dependencies and little unsafe code, take a look at https://github.com/algesten/ureq

Give ureq a try: https://github.com/algesten/ureq

It is a simple trait providing many asserters. This trait is then implemented for many http clients: reqwest, surf, isahc, hyper and actix.

This indicates curl, zlib, openssl, and libnghttp2 as well as a bunch of WASM-related things are being dynamically linked into my executable. To resolve this, I looked at the build features exposed by surf and found that it selects the "curl_client" feature by default, which can be turned off and replaced with "h1-client-rustls" which uses an HTTP client backed by rustls and async-std and no dynamically linked libraries. Enabling this build feature removed all -sys dependencies from androidx-release-watcher, allowing me to build static executables of it.

https://github.com/http-rs/surf provides an abstraction over several backends, but forces you into async and async-std, and the abstractions it provides are very limited anyway.