An Overview of Go Web Frameworks

4 minutes read
Notes • Go • WebDevelopment • WebFrameworks
golang • go

Introduction

Exploration of http servers in Go. The packages under considerations are,

https://github.com/go-chi/chi

  • chi is a lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go 1.7+ HTTP services.
  • Designed to support larg REST API services.
  • built on top of context a go package that handles signaling, cancelation and request-scoped values across a handler chain.
  • The features reported in the readme are,
  • Lightweight - cloc’d in ~1000 LOC for the chi router
  • Fast - yes, see benchmarks
  • 100% compatible with net/http - use any http or middleware pkg in the ecosystem that is also compatible with net/http
  • Designed for modular/composable APIs - middlewares, inline middlewares, route groups and subrouter mounting
  • Context control - built on new context package, providing value chaining, cancelations and timeouts
  • Robust - in production at Pressly, CloudFlare, Heroku, 99Designs, and many others (see discussion)
  • Doc generation - docgen auto-generates routing documentation from your source to JSON or Markdown
  • No external dependencies - plain ol’ Go 1.7+ stdlib + net/http
  • Comes with a set of detailed examples
  • MIT License

In numbers

  • 3652 stars in github
  • 46 contributors
  • 472 commits
  • 254 forks
  • 17 releases

Remarks

  • Growing dev community
  • It looks like a suitable candidate for REST-API Serivices in Go
  • the docs convinced me, they are clear
  • well documented, looks simple to use

https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter

  • HttpRouter is a lightweight high performance HTTP request router (also called multiplexer or just mux for short) for Go.
  • Good scaling
  • Good performance benchmarkings (claims to be amongst the bests)
  • net/http compliance
  • Well documented
  • Lincense is not clear (GNU-like)

In numbers

  • 7213 stars on github
  • 32 contributors
  • 206 commits
  • 718 forks
  • 2 releases

Remarks

  • The license is not clear
  • Has an interesinting backing community

https://github.com/gorilla/mux

  • Package gorilla/mux implements a request router and dispatcher for matching incoming requests to their respective handler.
  • Not a REST specific
  • More of an http router
  • net/http compliant

In numbers

  • 6435 stars on github
  • 66 contributors
  • 238 commits
  • 778 forks
  • 8 releases

Remarks

  • Not REST Specific, this makes gorilla/mux a non suitable candidate
  • good backing community in its favor
  • well documented

https://goji.io/

  • Goji is a HTTP request multiplexer, similar to net/http.ServeMux.

  • Goji itself has very few features: it is first and foremost a standard set of interfaces for writing web applications. Several subpackages are distributed with Goji to provide standard production-ready implementations of several of the interfaces, however users are also encouraged to implement the interfaces on their own, especially if their needs are unusual.

  • MIT License

In numbers

  • 649 stars on github
  • 4 contributors
  • 51 commits
  • 45 forks
  • 3 releases

Remarks

  • Not a suitable prospect
  • Not very active, though some people recommended it

https://github.com/labstack/echo

  • Optimized HTTP router which smartly prioritize routes
  • Build robust and scalable RESTful APIs
  • Group APIs
  • Extensible middleware framework
  • Define middleware at root, group or route level
  • Data binding for JSON, XML and form payload
  • Handy functions to send variety of HTTP responses
  • Centralized HTTP error handling
  • Template rendering with any template engine
  • Define your format for the logger
  • Highly customizable
  • Automatic TLS via Let’s Encrypt
  • HTTP/2 support
  • MIT License

In numbers

  • 10790 stars on github
  • 103 contributors
  • 1207 commits
  • 950 forks
  • 57 releases

Remarks

  • Has very active development
  • has a good backing community
  • Benchmarks show good performance (or the say so)
  • well documented, looks simple to use

https://github.com/manyminds/api2go

A JSON API Implementation for Go, to be used e.g. as server for Ember Data.

In numbers

  • 519 stars on github
  • 23 contributors
  • 521 commits
  • 66 forks
  • 10 releases

Remarks

  • Doesn’t look appealing, since JSON API is not our primary objective
  • I’m not really convinced with the project whatsoever

https://github.com/go-swagger/go-swagger

  • Sponsored by VMWare

  • golang implementation of Swagger 2.0 (aka OpenAPI 2.0): it knows how to serialize and deserialize swagger specifications.

  • go-swagger brings to the go community a complete suite of fully-featured, high-performance, API components to work with a Swagger API: server, client and data model.

Generates a server from a swagger specification Generates a client from a swagger specification Supports most features offered by jsonschema and swagger, including polymorphism Generates a swagger specification from annotated go code Additional tools to work with a swagger spec Great customization features, with vendor extensions and customizable templates

  • Apache 2.0 License

In numbers

  • 2391 stars on github
  • 144 contributors
  • 2185 commits
  • 440 forks
  • 36 releases

Remarks

  • I’m not sure if SWAGGER 2.0 is what we want, if so it looks like a good candidate
  • Well documented and with a good dev community
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