Rust Web Programming: A hands-on guide to Rust for modern web development, with microservices and nanoservices

A comprehensive guide to developing, packaging, and deploying Rust web applications – with new coverage on async Rust, WebAssembly, nanoservices, and more.

Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in PDF format.

Key Features

• Get a comprehensive introduction to Rust for full-stack web development
• Explore the exciting evolution of Rust in recent years with WebAssembly, Axum, native TLS, and SurrealDB
• Build code in a scalable way with microservice and nanoservice design patterns

Book Description

Rust is no longer just for systems programming. This book will show you why this safe and performant language is a crucial up-and-coming option for developing web applications, and get you on your way to building fully functional Rust web apps. You don’t need any experience with Rust to get started, and this new edition also comes with a shallower learning curve.

You’ll get hands-on with emerging Rust web frameworks including Actix, Axum, Rocket, and Hyper. You’ll look at injecting Rust into the frontend with WebAssembly and HTTPS configuration with NGINX. Later, you’ll move on to more advanced async topics, exploring TCP and framing, and implementing async systems.

As you work through the book, you’ll build a to-do application with authentication using a microservice architecture that compiles into one Rust binary, including the embedding of a frontend JavaScript application in the same binary. The application will have end-to-end atomic testing and a deployment pipeline.

By the end of this book, you’ll fully understand the significance of Rust for web development. You’ll also have the confidence to build robust, functional, and scalable Rust web applications from scratch.

What you will learn

• Build scalable Rust web applications as monoliths or microservices
• Develop a deeper understanding of async Rust
• Get to grips with Rust language features such as traits and the borrow checker
• Manage authentication and databases in Rust web apps
• Build app infrastructure on AWS using Terraform
• Learn how to package and deploy Rust servers
• Build unit tests and end-to-end tests for your Rust web apps with Python

Who this book is for

This book is for web developers who are looking to learn or adopt Rust to build safe and performant web applications. This includes developers familiar with languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.

You don’t need any prior experience in Rust to start this book. However, you’ll need a solid understanding of web development principles, along with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to get the most out of it.

Table of Contents

1. A Quick Introduction to Rust
2. Useful Rust Patterns for Web Programming
3. Designing Your Web Application in Rust
4. Async Rust
5. Handling HTTP Requests
6. Processing HTTP Requests
7. Displaying Content in the Browser
8. Injecting Rust in the Frontend with WebAssembly
9. Data Persistence with PostgreSQL
10. Managing User Sessions
11. Communicating Between Servers
12. Caching Auth Sessions
13. Observability Through Logging
14. Unit Testing
15. End-to-End Testing
16. Deploying Our Application on AWS
17. Configuring HTTPS with NGINX on AWS
18. Practicalities of Using Microservices and Nanoservices
19. Low-Level Networking
20. Distributed Computing

Maxwell Flitton is a software engineer who works for the open source financial loss modeling foundation OasisLMF. In 2011, Maxwell achieved his Bachelor of Science degree in nursing from the University of Lincoln, UK. While working 12-hour shifts in the A&E departments of hospitals, Maxwell obtained another degree in physics from the Open University in the UK and then moved on to another milestone, with a postgraduate diploma in physics and engineering in medicine from UCL in London. He's worked on numerous projects such as medical simulation soft ware for the German government and supervising computational medicine students at Imperial College London. He also has experience in financial tech and Monolith AI.