Building a Native GUI Application with Rust and Iced.rs
Rust has been gaining popularity as a programming language, and its ecosystem is rapidly expanding. One area that has seen significant growth is the development of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to build a native GUI application using Rust and the Iced.rs library.
Iced.rs vs. Yew: What’s the Difference?
Before we dive into building our application, let’s compare Iced.rs with Yew, another popular Rust framework for building web applications. While Yew is designed specifically for web development, Iced.rs focuses on cross-platform GUI applications, making it an excellent choice for building native desktop applications. Iced.rs is also inspired by the Elm architecture, which provides a unique approach to building GUI applications.
Setting Up Iced.rs
To get started, you’ll need a recent version of Rust installed on your system. Create a new Rust project and add the necessary dependencies to your Cargo.toml file, including Iced.rs, iced_web, reqwest, and serde. We’ll also pin the wasm-bindgen version to ensure compatibility when building our application.
Creating the User Interface
Our application will consist of a simple list-detail interface, where we’ll fetch data from JSONPlaceholder and display it in a list. We’ll create a data.rs file to handle data access and define our Post and Comment structs. We’ll also implement functions to fetch data from JSONPlaceholder using the Reqwest HTTP client.
Building the UI with Iced.rs
Iced.rs applications consist of four central concepts: State, Messages, Update, and View. We’ll define our App struct and implement the Application trait, which will handle our application’s state and messaging. We’ll also create Post and Comment widgets, which will render our data.
Putting it All Together
In our main.rs file, we’ll define our App struct and implement the Application trait. We’ll also define our Message struct, which will handle our application’s data flow. We’ll implement the update function to handle messages and update our application state.
Testing Our Application
Finally, we’ll run our application using trunk serve, which will build and run our app on http://localhost:8080. We’ll see our list-detail interface in action, with posts and comments fetched from JSONPlaceholder.
Conclusion
Building a native GUI application with Rust and Iced.rs is a straightforward process, especially for developers familiar with Elm or Rust. While Iced.rs is still in active development, its focus on cross-platform GUI applications makes it an exciting choice for building native desktop applications. With its growing community and helpful documentation, Iced.rs is definitely worth exploring.