axum for type-safe async HTTP servers

Axum is a modern web framework built on tokio and hyper. It uses extractors (like Json<T>, Path<T>, State<S>) to parse requests into Rust types, and the compiler ensures your handlers match their routes. Middleware is just functions, making it easy to compose. I like axum because it's minimalist but ergonomic: no macros, just traits and async functions. The Router API is clean, and integration with tower services gives you battle-tested middleware (tracing, timeouts, rate limiting). For APIs, I define request/response types as structs, and axum handles serialization with serde_json. It's my go-to for building production HTTP services in Rust because the type safety catches bugs early and the performance is excellent.