Tag: actix

Ever since it’s illegal for me to leave my house, my weekends have been filled with rewriting Whisperfish. Whisperfish is an app, originally by Andrew E. Bruno, that natively implements Signal for SailfishOS. My goal with the rewrite is to modernize the non-GUI code such that it uses the official libsignal-protocol-c instead of the Go-reimplementation. For this, I would either use C++ or Rust; the title of the post probably spoiled which one I prefer.

I’m imagining two target audiences for this blog post: either you’re a Rustacean, and you’re here for the Tokio and Actix magic, or (and that’s not xor) you’re from the SailfishOS community and you’re wondering what all the Tokio and Actix buzzwords are even about. With that in mind, I’ll make an introduction on both topics, and depending on your background, you can skip either.

In this tutorial, we are going to create a REST API in Rust with Actix web 2.0 and Diesel. We will be using Postgres as our database.

Today I want to show how to build a simple microservice. We will use Actix, Tokio-Postgress, and other libraries. We will use Postgress as our source of truth and we will run it in docker (for development sake). We also will use Barrel + some customs migration structure I created. The code will be all async and non-blocking IO. I hope you have fun, let’s get started.

I’m playing with the usual format to do a medium dive into an active frontier: web technology in Rust. The language and its ecosystem have seen a lot of change over the last few years and I would have advocated against it in serious projects for its evanescent APIs alone. But there’s good reason to be optimistic about the state of Rust coming into 2020 – critical features and APIs have stabilized, substrate libraries are ready and available, tooling is polished to the point of outshining everything else. The keystones are finally set, ready to bear load.