new Workshop Idea: a crabby compliment web app in Rust

[ashleygwilliams]

i took the app that i usually teach during NodeTogether, and ported it to rust,

• repo: https://github.com/ashleygwilliams/rust-emergency-compliment
• demo: https://rust-together.herokuapp.com/

i'd need to write up instructions but i think this would make a nice workshop.
it usually takes me ~5hrs to teach the app when i teach it in node.

would love feedback

[skade]

Hi Ashley,

<3 the effort.

I noticed that our initial RustBridge meeting was only half written down (notes here) https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/rustbridge.

I'd just like to document some of the stuff we talked about there (this is a mental note). Don't take this as fundamental criticism or even direct feedback to this, this is just where this occured to me.

When brainstorming workshop topics, we had discussed that given the state of web technologies in Rust (everything is alpha, and even finding a stable templating lib is hard), we didn't feel comfortable building a web example or porting any of the existing examples over. We just didn't see how things learned were even applicable next week.

That said, I'm happy to see such a workshop and it fits our "multi-angle" approach very well! If we can address the issues above in some fashion, it would be great.

I'm also ignoring web development in Rust a little, so maybe I'll try this out at some time to get an overview :).

Best,
Florian

[ashleygwilliams]

hi @skade thanks for the comments!

as far as not being stable, i totally hear that and think that that will inevitably be a maintenance burden, which we should definitely be looking to reduce as much as possible.

that being said, the number of dependencies and the amount of code overhead required to get the web interface working is very very small and approachable to students. particularly students coming from web development. pencil, while a library is still very small and exposes an API that people coming from ruby, javascript, or python are very familiar with (at least- perhaps more languages as well.)

i think the familiar API, and small amount of boilerplate, makes this more approachable than the mondrian example. plus the resulting application is easily deployable which gives the students an immediately sharable project.

also, being a web project, it allows students to modify the resulting project with tools they potentially already know like HTML and CSS or even just dropping in images, which makes the sharable element even better because what can be shared is customizable and therefore personal.

just my few thoughts! i don't know how to mitigate the maturity of web libraries in rust besides time, but if we hold pencil at the current release number, we can be sure it works. pencil ships with handlebars which is a very familiar templating library to most web devs and is also very stable. for this reason the rust example is actually simpler than the node project i walk people through in NodeTogether. pretty awesome, imo.

interested to hear more people's thoughts!

-a