I was wondering if anyone is even working on it or not. I think a Django equivalent is extremely important in Rust. Diesel is great but it's no Django. I found a crate Butane, which has some features of Django and it's awesome. However, it hasn't been updated in a while.
I think making a Django equivalent would lead to the mass adoption of Rust in web development. Let's be real, no one is using Rust for web in production except for the pros. Meanwhile, even the noobs use Django in production. Maybe building a library on top of Actix-web (perhaps) is just what the community needs.
Some people would argue that Django is set in its way and you don't have the freedom to do whatever. To them, I say, maybe it's the best thing. In my opinion, with that freedom comes a great deal of uncertainty. I have been using Actix-web and it's been great, but there is no defined folder structure like Flask(that's why Flask sucks) for example or caching(remember how easy it is to implement caching in Django) or the Admin page(God, I love that stuff) and don't forget the best of all, pre-configured and integrated with various databases. This makes it incredibly difficult to read someone else's code because everyone is doing their own stuff without caring for a similar interface.
I think we can all agree that 99.99% of web apps have a User model and it would be great if it comes pre-written and configured. I had to scrape through lots of documentation, examples, and videos to implement the User model in Rust.
Perhaps, the Rust community can learn something from Django, .NET, and Spring, etc. Being set in their ways is what made these frameworks widely famous and easy to learn and adapt for beginners.
I know it's impossible to make a framework like Django in a week or months but all I want to know is if someone is at least working on it. If not, let's start!
Have you checked out sea-orm? It seems to be a well-loved ORM that might be to your liking.
As to your question, I'm not aware of any projects that aim for something like Django or Rails in Rust. Might not be as hard to develop such a thing, I feel like most of the parts that make up these more integrated frameworks are already in place, somebody just has to wire them together. Might be a hard sell to a community that generally prefers control, expressiveness and only buying what one needs over convenience in my opinion though. Rocket seems to be the framework closest to what you are after, but it also doesn't have its own ORM (which to me seems like the main thing you are after, at least it is the one feature of Django that every avid user of it seems to love the most). Actix (being the oldest framework of the more widely used ones) also has a ton of abstractions for the most common workflows that come up when writing modern web servers.
Let me start by saying that after putting two Django-based projects in production (each with a userbase of tens of thousands) I am not a fan of it. I like some of its features (and I understand why those features are attractive to "noobs" as you call them) but in the end I better like the "library" approach of other systems (vs the "framework" approach of Django).
Said that, I don't think trying to replicate Django feature-for-feature will work in Rust, and for two reasons:
Rust and Python are very different languages and Django internals uses a lot of the dynamic typing that is one of the main characteristics of Python: there is no guarantee that porting Django's features to Rust will result in ergonomic code. For an example, have a look at diesel vs an ORM that can leverage a dynamic language (SQLAlchemy) or just a language that supports runtime reflection and code generation (EF Core): their API are very different and for a reason.
While there are some "frameworks" written in Rust (bevy, for example, just to talk about something that is not web-based) in my experience a lot of people using Rust try to keep it "minimal", adding just the libraries needed for a specific task and avoiding large framworks. If this really is the case (as I said, it is my experience) finding a group of people motivated enough to write a large framework such as Django will be difficult, because there is really no "pressure" to do it.
To me Pavex is much more similar to barebone ASP.NET Core (without Identity, Razor, etc) than anything else. I don't see integrated ORM, forms, management UI or any of the "standard" Django features.
Also, do you have any idea why an activation key is required for Apache-licensed code. This is something that I never understood (but I never really used Pavex too).
I only said that the author wants it to be like Django, not that it already is like Django. Pavex is still in early development, so we are far from it offering everything that Django does.
Yes. The author wanted it to be a paid license, without closing the source. So having an activation key was his mid-way solution.
SeaORM is amazing and with the added integration of Graphql, this is godsend for me right now. Thanks for introducing me to it. I am very surprised that it didn't come up when I was searching for Django alternatives for Rust.
I completely agree. While developing, I kept thinking the same thing. If only someone took care of all these configurations for me, how awesome would it be.
You are probably right but I really feel like having something slightly opiniated is worth giving up the control.
Sidenote: I'm always so happy when I write a nice SQL query instead of application code. A tight database design with tight constraints is so satisfying to me. ORMs have rarely satisfied me.
I also put a few Django projects in production and the only problem I sometimes had was the migrations. But that's just an ORM thing, even Diesel does it the similar way. I am interested to know what issues you faced that made you didn't like it.
I am aware that they are completely different language and replicating feature-for-feature would probably be impossible but all I want is the closeness to the way of developing websites in Django. Like having a base User model that takes care of user auth for you or the admin page to see and manage the data visually. It really helps in development.
You are probably right. It's gonna be difficult to find such a group.
Highly unlikely that a single framework would do that.
This is just false, you can google something like "server rewrite Rust" and encounter dozens of stories where people re-wrote their web backends in Rust (or frontends, even, using WASM), and achieved performance improvements.
