Handling JSON payloads

After learning how to create APIs, we need to pass data back and forth. While the path provides one method to do that, anything a little more sophisticated (for example, a long list of things) will quickly show the limitations of these methods. This is why other formats are typically used to structure the data—JSON (http://json.org/) is the most popular for web services. In this chapter, we are going to use the previous API and enhance it by handling and returning JSON.

Getting ready

Let's set up a Rust binary project using cargo new json-handling. Since we are going to serve stuff on the local port 8081, make sure that the port is accessible as well. Additionally, a program such as curl...