Overview

Gulpin.games is a website I have been working on with a friend for playing fun and silly real-time 1-on-1 games online with friends. We have currently implemented ultimate tic-tac-toe, chess, and connect-4, with plans for adding Pokémon Chess and other chess variants in the future. My friend has been working primarily on the frontend while I work on the backend.

View source code on GitHub

Choosing our Stack

We decided to use Next.js with Typescript for the frontend because we both have used the framework in past projects and it also handles page routing, dynamic routes, caching, server-side rendering, etc. which we wanted/needed for this website. We used TailwindCSS for styling and deployed the frontend using Vercel.

For the backend, I chose to use a Rust web framework called Actix since I wanted to get more practice with Rust. Rust also happens to be a great backend language in my opinion because of several features:

• A very strict and expressive type system and great JSON serialization with serde, making it very nice to work with the request/response bodies (struct variants on enums are particularly great for this)
• Async support with Tokio (and made very easy with Actix)
• Great performance and memory safety is a big plus
• Elegant ways to handle possibly nonexistent data (e.g. when querying the database) using Option, Result, match, if let/while let, etc.

On top of these Rust features that make it a nice backend language, Actix in particular makes it very easy to set up and route endpoints and also include middleware for things like logging, handling user sessions, and so on.

For user data, we used PostgreSQL with Prisma ORM, and for user sessions, we used a Redis cache. The backend (and both databases) are all deployed on fly.io with Docker to containerize the backend. For storing additional objects such as user profile pictures (in-progress feature), we are using an AWS S3 bucket.