Gotham

Gotham was one of the earliest Rust web frameworks, but its development has largely stalled in recent years, with little active maintenance on the repository. For new projects in the mid-2020s, most Rust developers have moved to actively developed alternatives like Axum and Actix-web.

Gotham pioneered patterns like middleware pipelines and type-safe request handling, but Axum (from the Tokio team) and Actix-web now have far larger ecosystems, better documentation, and more frequent updates. Gotham remains usable for simple apps, but community momentum has clearly shifted.

Yes, Gotham is built on asynchronous foundations, working with the tokio/hyper ecosystem, and provides a middleware pipeline for concerns like logging, sessions, and authentication. Shared application state is passed through that pipeline to your handlers, keeping request processing type-safe.

The common pattern is to establish a connection pool (for example with diesel or sqlx) at startup and insert it into Gotham's shared state, where every request handler can access it. Middleware can wrap the logic of checking out a connection and attaching it to the request data.