Rust & MongoDB - Perfect Bedfellows

I've been learning Rust over the last month or so and I'm really enjoying it. It's a really elegant and flexible programming language despite being the most strongly typed and compile-time strict programming language I've ever used (bearing in mind I used to be a professional C & C++ developer way back in the day). 

I'd recently read the really good and commonly referenced blog post Creating a REST API in Rust with warp, which shows how to create a simple example Groceries stock management REST API service, and which uses an in-memory HashMap as its backing store. As part of my learning I thought I'd have a go at porting this to use MongoDB as its data store instead, using the fairly new MongoDB Rust Driver.

It turns out that this was really easy to do, also due to how well engineered the new MongoDB Rust Driver turned out to be, with its rich yet easy to use API. 

You can see my resulting MongoDB version of this sample Groceries application, in the Github project rust-groceries-mongo-api I created. Check out that project link to view the source code showing how MongoDB was integrated with for the Groceries REST API and how to test the application using a REST client.

What was even more surprising was how easy it was to integrate MongoDB's flexible data model with a programming language as strict as Rust, and I encountered no friction between the two at all. In fact, this was even easier to achieve by leveraging the option of using the driver team's additional contribution of BSON translation to the open source Rust Serde framework, which makes it easy to serialize/deserialize Rust data structures to/from other formats (e.g. JSON, Avro and now BSON).

I plan to blog again in the future, in more detail, about how to combine Rust's strict typing and MongoDB's flexible schema, especially when the data model and consuming microservices inevitably change over time. [UPDATE 09-Dec-2020: I have now blogged on this at MongoDB DevHub, see: The Six Principles for Building Robust Yet Flexible Shared Data Applications]

Song for today: Dissolution by Cloud Nothings