Edit on year Jun 19, 2018

Project has been discontinued due to Rust still does not support Async/Await which i think is crucial for web development

Intro

If you ask what is the rising star of programming language, it will be rust for recent year.

Potential of Rust in Web Development

• Execution Speed
• No garbage collection (as compared to JAVA or GO web development)
• Build in code safety
• Compile to binary

Is 2018 the right time to use Rust for web development?

With the asynchronous I/O libraries of Rust is mostly ready, Rust can serve web traffic without being I/O bound. However, the only downside is that framework is not mature yet.

Top Web Development Framework For Rust

• Iron: Not much investigate into it, but seems like not as maintained as Rocket
• Rocket: Currently(0.3.6) is build on synchronous HTTP backend. Provide higher level of abstraction however has less control on what you can do.
• Hyper: Hyper(0.11) is multithreaded asynchronous low-level typesafe abstraction over raw HTTP. However the example on it is not much and too low-level.

Time for Develop a new Framework?

Well I actually think making a wrapper on top of Hyper will be good enough! I currently name it as Hyperap and published it to Github! Have not publish to crates.io yet because I have some issue login into it.

The code is still in development, I plan to use it as the main framework for my pet project.

Example Usage

To test it (assumed you have rust cargo installed)

git clone https://github.com/nghenglim/hyperap
cd hyperap && cargo run

extern crate hyperap;
use hyperap::hyper::server::{Response};
use hyperap::hyper::{Method};
use hyperap::server::{HyperApp, Middleware, MiddlewareParam};
use hyperap::response::{resp};

fn get_static(_a: MiddlewareResult) -> Response {
    hyperap::server::static_file("Cargo.toml")
}
fn hello_world(a: MiddlewareResult) -> Response {
    resp(a.hello.clone() + " at path " + &a.path)
}
fn not_found_route(a: MiddlewareResult) -> Response {
    resp("not found route at path ".to_owned() + &a.path)
}
pub struct App {
    pub hello: String,
}
pub struct MiddlewareResult {
    path: String,
    pub hello: String,
}
#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct RouteDefinition {
    parameters: Vec<RouteDefinitionParameters>
}
#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct RouteDefinitionParameters {
    _in: String,
    _name: String,
}
impl Middleware for App {
    type M = MiddlewareResult;
    type R = RouteDefinition;
    fn middleware(&self, p: MiddlewareParam<MiddlewareResult, Self::R>) -> Response {
        let m = MiddlewareResult {
            path: p.req.path().to_owned(),
            hello: self.hello.clone(),
        };
        (p.func)(m)
    }
}
fn main() {
    let the_app = App {
        hello: "Hello World".to_owned(),
    };
    let mut app = HyperApp::new(the_app);
    app.open_browser(true);
    app.set_default_route(not_found_route);
    app.add_route(Method::Get, "/static", get_static, vec![RouteDefinition {
        parameters: vec![RouteDefinitionParameters {
            _in: "query".to_owned(),
            _name: "offset".to_owned(),
        }]
    }]);
    app.add_pure_route(Method::Get, "/", hello_world);
    app.port(3000);
    app.run();
}

Other critical part in web development

• ORM: with feature similar to Sequelize
• Query builder There seems to be some libraries for it, however coming from NodeJS, the feature that these libraries just cannot fulfill my need.

I'm currently working on making a rust ORM library. However most probably will remain as my private repo unless a lot of people interested on it.