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Show HN: Rust Web Framework

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488 points levkk | 3 comments | 22 Oct 24 14:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.705s | source

Hi everyone,

I've been "funemployed" for a few months and with all that free time and idle hands I wrote a full web framework (think Rails, not Flask) for Rust.

It's boring old MVC, has its own ORM, templates, background jobs, auth, websockets, migrations and more. If you're keen but don't feel like rewriting your app in a different language, Rwf has a WSGI server to run Django (or Flask) inside Rust [1], letting you migrate to Rust at your own pace without disrupting your website.

I think Rust makes a great prototyping and deploy straight to production language. Now it has yet another framework for y'all to play with.

Cheers!

[1] https://levkk.github.io/rwf/migrating-from-python/

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kvirani ◴[22 Oct 24 14:59 UTC] No.41914951[source]▶
Nice, congratulations. It must feel so surreal launching this!

One of my biggest learnings from doing a bunch of web MVC through Rails over the years is that the framework should heavily discourage business logic in the model layer.

Some suggestions:

- Don't allow "callbacks" (what AR calls them) ie hooks like afterCreate in the data model. I know you don't have these yet in your ORM, but in case those are on the roadmap, my opinion is that they should not be.

- That only really works though if you not strongly encourage a service aka business logic layer. Most of my Rails app tend to have all of these as command aka service objects using a gem (library/package) like Interactor.*

* It's my view that MVC (and therefore Rails otb) is not ideal by itself to write a production-ready app, because of the missing service layer.

Also, curious why existing ORMs or query builders from the community weren't leveraged?

Disclaimer: I haven't written a line of Rust yet (more curious as the days go by). I'm more curious than ever now, thanks to you!

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ecshafer ◴[22 Oct 24 16:05 UTC] No.41915698[source]▶
> One of my biggest learnings from doing a bunch of web MVC through Rails over the years is that the framework should heavily discourage business logic in the model layer.

I am curious where this comes from, because my thinking is the absolutely opposite. As much business logic as possible should belong in the model. Services should almost all be specific more complex pieces of code that are triggered from the model. Skinny controller, Fat Model, is the logic of code organization that I find makes code the easiest to debug, organize, and discover. Heavy service use end up with a lot of spaghetti code in my experience.

The other part is that from a pure OOP pov, the model is the base object of what defines the entity. Your "User" should know everything about itself, and should communicate with other entities via messages.

> Don't allow "callbacks" (what AR calls them) ie hooks like afterCreate in the data model. I know you don't have these yet in your ORM, but in case those are on the roadmap, my opinion is that they should not be.

This I agree with. Callbacks cause a lot of weird side effects that makes code really hard to debug.

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JodieBenitez ◴[22 Oct 24 18:43 UTC] No.41917360[source]▶
> This I agree with. Callbacks cause a lot of weird side effects that makes code really hard to debug.

Also Django signals, Symfony events... makes things extensible but also hard to debug indeed.

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fragmede ◴[22 Oct 24 19:08 UTC] No.41917582[source]▶
attach a debugger to the running process
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1. LaGrange ◴[23 Oct 24 00:09 UTC] No.41920092[source]▶
Such a simple thing, but so many organizations love to set up their projects in ways that make attaching a debugger surprisingly tricky.

Even the most basic text editor and pretty much every language support interactive debugging - but if you set up a bunch of docker containers in a very careless way, you end up introducing a layer that disrupts that integration. It's fixable, but for that you need to think _a bit_ about it, and most devs I meet these days are like "eh, why do an interactive debugger, print statements exist" (and then be like "oh no signals are hard to debug :(").

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2. JodieBenitez ◴[23 Oct 24 08:35 UTC] No.41923050[source]▶
"debug" was a poor choice of word on my part. It's not about debugging, more about following the logic when the program is read by a developer.
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3. LaGrange ◴[23 Oct 24 12:13 UTC] No.41924184[source]▶
That's fair enough, though again, interactive debugging can really help with understanding what's going on by just stepping through the call as it happens - just click "debug" on the test and play around with it.

But I'd agree the issue is real, and we're discussing mitigation of it, and whether it's sufficient. It's definitely possible to turn your code into aspect-oriented programming hell with careless use of signals, hooks and the likes.