Building Web Applications with Rocket

About Rust Basel

• Founded today
• Just me (and anyone in the meetup group who wants to participate)

Inspired by

• Rust ZH
• Other meetups in Basel
• Rust the language
  • don't worry about 'small', it will pay off 

For and by enthusiasts

• Rust is a systems language and allows you to go "down to the metal"
• Therefore it is a language for enthusiasts
• Speed and efficiency enthusiasm should be at the center of this group

About me and Rust

• Basically this is about Scala

Beginners welcome

• I am a beginner
• Rust beginners =/= overall beginners
  • Rust is probably not the best 'first language'
• If you're already a pro, please have the next talk

Purpose

• promote
• discover together

Help wanted

• talks
• sponsors
• hosts
• ideas
• spread the word
• ...

Rocket

WASM?

• So Rust is for WebAssembly, right?
• The new Javascript?
• Sorry, not tonight...
• We'll look at 2000's architecture:
  • Server-side
  • no (or little) ajax
  • Like PHP Frameworks, Ruby on Rails

Conservative system design

• classical backend framework with
  • routing
  • templating
  • form validation
  • cookies
  • (relational) database support

Feels familiar

• Rails
• Symfony
• Express

Feels complete

Framework

• Agent based testing
• Included templating language
• Multi-env config
• Middleware (fairings)
• Live Reload

Rust

• Cargo, Rustdocs, Doctests
• Type System
• Diesel ORM

Leverages Rust

• Uses nightly features (procedural macros, declarative macros 2.0)
  • as a route DSL:

Actix vs Rocket

• looked at Actix & Rocket.
• Actix is more modular, less "packaged"
• Went for rocket bc of docs, examples, speed
• while taking into account current disadvantage (dependent on nightly)
• for prod, I might suggest Actix today

IDE & Build tools

• Plugins for all major IDEs
  • IntelliJ
  • VS Code
  • Vim
  • Atom
• Debugging integration via GDB into CLion

Repositories, Documentation

 

• Cargo
• crates.io
• Rustdocs

 

= Community tooling

This is where Rust really shines!