Implementing a REST API for stellar data being used in a Mongoose Traveller Deepnight Revelation campaign.
As a learning excercise, the REST server is being built in different languages/frameworks.
Express is the web server and knex is used for database access.
I have experience with both, so not much new here. The service was up and running in a couple of hours.
nodejs felt comfortable as async web services sit well with my mental model.
Axium is used for the REST framework and SQLx for database access.
It has been a long time since I worked in a strongly typed language. I kept getting 'C' flashbacks. Which, probably, was bad as Rust is not 'C'.
It took about 2 days to get the service up and running. That is not a reflection on Axios/SQLx; the bulk of the time was trying to figure out how to do things in Rust. I discovered Rustlings after I finished the Rust project. I plan on going through them and then implementing the service again to see how much quicker it can be implemented.
Given the minimal exposure I have had with Rust, it feels like the problems it concerns itself with are not the problems I concern myself with. I can see the appeal for certain domains. But, for web services, Express/Rails feels more natural.
Rails was used for, well, everything. 'cause, Rails. :)
I had never written anything in Ruby. After working through Ruby Koans, I started on implementing the server in Rails. It was up and running in about half a day.
Ruby feels like my kind-of language. I like the "everything is an object" approach to life. It will be interesting to compare Ruby and Smalltalk.
The /solarsystems?ulsx=-19&ulsy=-2 was used to time the server responses. This call returns ~280 solar systems.
| Language | Server Time |
|---|---|
| nodejs | 180ms |
| Rust | 120ms |
| Ruby | 80ms |
The Rust response time when running in development mode is ~780ms. Compiling for production seems to be a good idea. :)