Axum, Askama, HTMX

Lately I’ve been working on Ulry, after tiressly trying to make Next.js work for me, I realised it wasn’t the right fit (I’m not alone). I decided to make a U-turn and go all in with Rust and SSR.

I already have my APIs running on axum, I know and like HTMX a bit as I’ve used it in some other minor project using Go [1]. Time to try something in new with Rust.

I only need something to render the pages for the webiste, axum bare Html<&str> is not going to cut it.

I stumbled upon Tera and Askama. The two are very similar templating frameworks - the only difference is that Askama compiles templates at compile time, Tera does not. This, in theory, makes Askama a lot faster. But I did not chose if for that reason alone, I’d argue that the selling point for me was that with Askama you don’t have to have templates to be parsed at runtime, you just have your binary file and everything is packaged in there.

Off to a good start.