In chapters 3 to 6 of the book, we built the tutor web service from scratch using Rust and the Actix Web framework. In this section, we’ll focus on learning the basics of building a web application in Rust. It may sound strange to use a system programming language to create a web application, but that’s the power of Rust. It can straddle the worlds of system and application programming with ease.
In this chapter, you will be introduced to concepts and tools you can use with Rust to build web applications. At this point, it is important to recall that there are two broad techniques for building web applications—server-side rendering (SSR) and single-page application (SPA)—each possibly taking the form of a progressive web application (PWA). In this section, we’ll focus on the former technique, and in later chapters, we’ll cover the latter. We will not cover PWAs in this book.