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Show HN: Rust Web Framework

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488 points levkk | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 14:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | 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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1. levkk ◴[23 Oct 24 16:16 UTC] No.41926524[source]▶
Thanks!

Re: callbacks. They are very nice, when you have CRUD endpoints that modify models directly from JavaScript [1]. It ends up being pretty DRY, especially since you'll find yourself modifying the same model from different places in the code, and without callbacks, you'll have bad data.

Re: service layer. It's a matter of taste, and you can probably avoid it until you're way in the thousands of LOCs. Rails and Django are all about building quickly - that's an advantage you shouldn't give away to your competitors. Service layer is a drag that you may need as an "enterprise".

Re: MVC not production-ready, we know that's not true, but appreciate the hot take, always a good starting point for a great discussion.

Re: existing ORMs, they were not flexible enough. I used ActiveRecord and Django as my inspiration; those are both excellent ORMs, while existing Rust ORMs lean too heavily on type safety in Rust in my opinion. The database should be the source of truth for data types, and the framework should allow for intentional drift.

Hope you get to try Rust soon. I've been using it for years, and I don't want to go back to Python or Ruby, hence this project.

Cheers!

[1] https://levkk.github.io/rwf/controllers/REST/model-controlle...