Project overview

We are going to build several projects, introducing new features in every project. Let's look at each one, as follows:

• The first project will build a stub of a service that should allow any client to upload, download, or delete files from the server. This project shows how to create a REST application programming interface (API), but it does no useful work.
• The second project will implement the API described in the previous project. It will build a service that actually allows any client to upload, download, or delete files from the server filesystem.
• The third project will build a service that allows clients to add key-value records to a memory database residing in the server process, and to recall some predefined queries built into the server. The result of such queries will be sent back to the client in plain text format.
• The fourth project will be similar to the third one, but the results will be encoded in JSON format.

Our source code is small, but it includes the Actix web crate, which in turn includes around 200 crates, and so the first build of any project will take around 10 minutes. Following any changes to the application code, a build will take from 12 to 30 seconds.

The Actix web crate has been chosen as it is the most feature-full, reliable, high-performance, and well-documented server-side web application framework for Rust.

This framework is not limited to RESTful services, as it can be used to build different kinds of server-side web software. It is an extension of the Actix net framework, which is a framework designed to implement different kinds of network services.