Since we're talking about responses let’s address the elephant in the room: HTML.

In Ruby pretty much every framework support some form of templating. Even barebones Sinatra gives you ERB out of the box and pretty much any other template engine is only one line in the gemfile away.

Axum doesn't provide any templating. You’ll have to bring your own.

I picked #Askama as it was the first templating engine on Are We Web Yet.

It's a dialect of Jinja. But maybe not 100% compatible. No matter.

One thing you learn fast is that in Rust everything is a type. So your template has to have an actual template and a struct that provides data for the template. You can't just put random code in your templates. On one hand it’s great as you can't by accident have n+1 queries in your template. On the other, to change something on the page you might to edit three files: the actual template, the struct for the template, and the handler to populate the struct.

There's no support for layouts. Well, there's kinda. Through template inheritance. It’s where you extend your layout by overriding some blocks in it. It's much more awkward than in Ruby. In Ruby layouts are conceptually separate. In Askama your template struct has to provide all the data for the template and all its parent templates. I don't even know if it's possible to render the same template in different layouts. The thing that is extremely easy in Ruby.

There's also no support for partials. At best you can insert renders of other templates. But that's awkward for many of the same reasons (mostly around providing data for the templates).

One major downside is that Askama uses proc macro to compile the templates to Rust. It makes it extremely fast but debugging templates is a nightmare. It gives you an error that something is missing or has a wrong type but doesn't tell you what it is or where in the template it is. Even with enabled proc macro backtraces it gives you a snippet of generated Rust code and not the template. Even the barebones ERB will give you the exact position in the template in case of an error.

So yeah, lots of frustration.

#Axum #Ruby #RubyOnRails #Rust