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by nik_s 2100 days ago
Congrats on the release! Actix is super exciting, and it's great to see how the community stepped up to maintain this amazing project.

Is there any effort to bring a Rails/Django like framework to Rust? AWWY [1] seems to indicate that there isn't anything like it in the Rust ecosystem, but I'd be curious to know if there's anyone working on something in that direction. All of the frameworks I've seen seem pretty "bare-bones" by the standards of Django/Rails (then again - it's hard to beat these frameworks in terms of feature-completeness).

[1] https://www.arewewebyet.org/

4 comments

Rocket seems to be the closest. It has a philosophy of including integrations with other libraries (templating, databases, etc) out of the box. But I think it'll be a good while until it gets close to Django/Rails. To be fair I think Django, Rails, and Laravel are the only 3 frameworks that have this level of functionality.
I haven't used Django, Rails, or Laravel but Elixir's Phoenix is significantly higher level than Rocket.
I've used all 4 and can support the sentiment. Though Phoenix (more the elixir ecosystem) is lacking the community critical mass to compete against the other 3...for now
Phoenix is fantastic.
Personally,I strongly prefer light libraries over comprehensive frameworks. Yes, you have to build up your app, but at least you understand what you're doing. And when something goes wrong you know how to fix it. You can follow the code. This is super hard with a framework like Django.
I totally understand the sentiment, and generally, when I do solo projects or projects with small teams, I also prefer light frameworks.

In my experience, frameworks like Django and Rails shine when you have to collaborate with large teams on solutions though - the fact that there's comprehensive documentation, best practices, and clear standards make it so much easier to work together on a project. I do think Rust brings a lot of assets through its type systems when collaborating, but rolling your own auth/admin dashboard/orm is a hefty investment for most mid-size companies.

I agree. Admin can be complicated but the breadth of authentication is surprising when you start enumerating the features. "I forgot my password" and "remember me" are the easiest ones and yet they're not a hour's job. Authentication is not where a company should invest its money. Use a well proven library and keep solving problems that bring home money.
Yes - plus, something like Rails is great for getting people on board. If the first experience of a new language is being able to get shit done at record pace, it really motivates you to learn more about it as well.
I’ll add in a datapoint from someone that’s used Django almost exclusively for web work over the last 5 years. I’ve had to debug Django many times and most of the code following has been my own. When I have had to dig into Django’s internals their extensive test suite and clear code structure has made it easy enough to find the issue.

Where I do find issue is that the lifecycle for their generic view API can be opaque. The docs have been improved there lately though.

I’ll echo other comments in that Django allows new developers with no experience in Django to be productive quickly. The docs are the MVP there and cover everything from tutorials to in-depth feature write-ups with examples and best-practices.

A Rails style framework would be really nice. I tried to get a Rocket/Diesel/Juniper setup working and it was a lot of futzing with types. One framework would be a lot smoother and get around any orphan rule issues.

The only question is how much Rails-style magic we'd want. We could get pretty crazy with macros but IME the debugging story with the macros used in Juniper wasn't great (maybe it's gotten better?).

> the community stepped up to maintain

More like forcefully commandeered if memory serves.