[d4mi3n]

Coming from the Ruby ecosystem, a lot of this played out similarly to how the Rack[1] middleware conventions developed in the early Rails v1 and v2 days. Prior to Rack there was a lot of fragmentation in HTTP server libraries, post-Rack everything more or less played nicely as long as libraries implemented Rack interfaces.

I don't write Rust professionally, but it was a bummer seeing that this seems to be a place that was figured out (painfully) in ecosystems used heavily for web development--Javascript and Elixir have their own Rack equivalents[2][3]. I hope that Tower plays a similar role to unify the library ecosystem in Rust.

1. https://github.com/rack/rack

2. http://expressjs.com/en/guide/writing-middleware.html

3. https://github.com/elixir-plug/plug

[nicoburns]

JavaScripts “Rack” equivalent is actually a library called “connect”, which express used to use under the hood as it’s middleware layer. The fact it doesn’t anymore is why I’m a little pessimistic about Tower, but it’s good to hear this has worked in other ecosystems.