Goji: a web microframework for Go • Hacker News Board

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#61

Post by cgag » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 10:46 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #49

cgag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more or less the philosophy of the Clojure community when it comes to web frameworks. Not sure what you're reasons for using Go are, but if you're open to dynamic typing you would probably appreciate Clojure's emphasis on avoiding this kind of complexity. Though to be honest I do see a decent amount of value in not rewritng form handling/validations/auth in a bunch of different ways.

I like Clojure a lot, and if I was building a new web app today, I'd strongly consider using it instead of Rails (for what it's worth: Golang is great for JSON web services, but not IMO great for full-features web apps, even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it). However, to talk myself out of using Rails, I'd need to convince myself…

The short answer is no. There's honeysql which basically lets you express sql in terms of Clojure's datastructures so you can get more reuse than you can with straight SQL strings, but it's not really an ORM as I understand it.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#62

Post by danneu » Tue, Apr 22, 2014, 11:38 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #49

cgag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more or less the philosophy of the Clojure community when it comes to web frameworks. Not sure what you're reasons for using Go are, but if you're open to dynamic typing you would probably appreciate Clojure's emphasis on avoiding this kind of complexity. Though to be honest I do see a decent amount of value in not rewritng form handling/validations/auth in a bunch of different ways.

I like Clojure a lot, and if I was building a new web app today, I'd strongly consider using it instead of Rails (for what it's worth: Golang is great for JSON web services, but not IMO great for full-features web apps, even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it). However, to talk myself out of using Rails, I'd need to convince myself…

There isn't one cohesive solution.

I imagine most people evolve helper functions around https://github.com/clojure/java.jdbc and then use something like https://github.com/jkk/honeysql or http://sqlkorma.com/ for generating actual select query SQL.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#63

Post by gcv » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 12:36 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #49

cgag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more or less the philosophy of the Clojure community when it comes to web frameworks. Not sure what you're reasons for using Go are, but if you're open to dynamic typing you would probably appreciate Clojure's emphasis on avoiding this kind of complexity. Though to be honest I do see a decent amount of value in not rewritng form handling/validations/auth in a bunch of different ways.

I like Clojure a lot, and if I was building a new web app today, I'd strongly consider using it instead of Rails (for what it's worth: Golang is great for JSON web services, but not IMO great for full-features web apps, even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it). However, to talk myself out of using Rails, I'd need to convince myself…

It seems to me that Rails' main advantage over Clojure+microframeworks for web development is the ability to use mature libraries to handle common tasks: user management with devise, for example.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#64

Post by Groostav » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 12:40 AM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #46

gnaritas wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lots of very intelligent people have problems with ORMs. And lots of very intelligent people like them. Both statements are meaningless appeals to authority. > Despite its many problems, SQL remains the best way of interacting with a relational database. That's your opinion, it's certainly not a fact, and just as many disagree as would agree. Secondly, ORM's don't stop you from using SQL where it's beneficial, so r…

> Your hand written CRUD operations gain you nothing but > extra work. And maintainability. (shrug)

So, getting fairly seriously tangential, what would you recommend for green field devs? Have you tried to skirt the ORM problem entirely and simply go for object stores / NoSQL?

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#65

Post by beefsack » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 1:30 AM UTC

zenazn wrote: post #10

leccine wrote: post #2

Sorry for my ignorance, how is this different, better than Martini? What is the main goal of creating a new framework (instead of getting the features you are missing implemented in the currently existing ones)?

To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure it is better (I was hoping you would help me decide that!), and I wrote it mostly because every aspiring programmer writes a web framework at some point, and it was time I wrote mine (it was a lot of fun :) ). But I think there's a good chance it is better. First, I think one important difference is that Goji isn't full of magical reflection. If Go had support for method overloadi…

The fact that you're trying to stick with strong typing as much as possible is very appealing to me, and now I'm convinced to try to port my new project from Martini to Goji.

I think this is a good point to differentiate yourself on, and perhaps it should be included in your elevator pitch.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#66

Post by parasubvert » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 3:45 AM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #40

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, for one, but don't take my word for it... lots of very intelligent people have problems with ORMs. http://blogs.tedneward.com/2006/06/26/The+Vietnam+Of+Compute... presents a good summary of the problems involved (forgive the inflammatory title). Despite its many problems, SQL remains the best way of interacting with a relational database.

> lots of very intelligent people have problems with ORMs. And lots of very intelligent people like them. Both statements are meaningless appeals to authority. > Despite its many problems, SQL remains the best way of interacting with a relational database. That's your opinion, it's certainly not a fact, and just as many disagree as would agree. Secondly, ORM's don't stop you from using SQL where it's beneficial, so r…

ORMs are never the "best" approach to data access. They are a heavyweight, leaky bridge between two very different abstractions (objects and relations).

An individual framework may have the right balance of tradeoffs for one's needs to manage the dynamic complexity of certain object graph update scenarios. But a blind choice of ORM has usually ended in tears on most projects that reach substantial complexity in my experience. Explicit SQL is much more predictable and often just as productive as discovering the voodoo to make your ORM-du-jour dance. The lighter the ORM, the better, in my opinion.

For what it's worth, Golang does have an early ORM of sorts, it's called Gorp. https://github.com/coopernurse/gorp

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#67

Post by threeseed » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 3:56 AM UTC

gcv wrote: post #63

tptacek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Clojure a lot, and if I was building a new web app today, I'd strongly consider using it instead of Rails (for what it's worth: Golang is great for JSON web services, but not IMO great for full-features web apps, even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it). However, to talk myself out of using Rails, I'd need to convince myself…

It seems to me that Rails' main advantage over Clojure+microframeworks for web development is the ability to use mature libraries to handle common tasks: user management with devise, for example.

Don't forget it is trivial to call Java libraries from Clojure which for breadth, quality and maturity eclipse all the other platforms.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#68

Post by parasubvert » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 4:00 AM UTC

Groostav wrote: post #64

sagichmal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your hand written CRUD operations gain you nothing but > extra work. And maintainability. (shrug)

So, getting fairly seriously tangential, what would you recommend for green field devs? Have you tried to skirt the ORM problem entirely and simply go for object stores / NoSQL?

Learning direct SQL would be preferable to doing ORM or NoSQL for a greenfield dev, if the problems they're solving involve managing "transactional" data (like sales / orders).

It's a great fallback skill to have and if you're ever going to use an ORM in anger you'll need to know SQL well anyway.

If they're mostly managing technical data (like clickstreams or logstreams), then, use whatever store makes sense.

SQL will be around for decades to come and at least gives one hope they'll learn something about the relational model which is our only logically grounded approach to managing data integrity.

NoSQL is appropriate when dealing with problems where

(a) have a different natural requirement than general-purpose logical data management, e.g. your problem maps neatly into a log store, document store, search index, flat file, or K/V store and there's no gain in decomposing these structures into relations

(b) no one is going to want to query this data or update these things arbitrarily (famous last words);

(c) require massive scale and continuous availability and thus don't fit with most of today's SQL databases. ... though you'd still be probably better off looking around Github for the various frameworks to help you manage a sharded/replicated MySQL or PostgreSQL setup before jumping into NoSQL.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#69

Post by elithrar » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 4:52 AM UTC

leccine wrote: post #2

Sorry for my ignorance, how is this different, better than Martini? What is the main goal of creating a new framework (instead of getting the features you are missing implemented in the currently existing ones)?

> Sorry for my ignorance, how is this different, better than Martini? What is the main goal of creating a new framework (instead of getting the features you are missing implemented in the currently existing ones)?

I truly do not understand this reasoning. Why build anything new at all if you can "improve" on something existing?

(the answers range from "because the existing doesn't facilitate the changes I would like to make" through to "learning experience", and everything in-between).

It is (thankfully) the opposite of this thinking that has given us the myriad of popular and useful web frameworks in other languages (Flask, web.py, Bottle, Sinatra, et. al) that all aim to solve different problems and/or offer differing levels of complexity/kitchen sink.

Re: Goji: a web microframework for Go

#70

Post by shiloa » Wed, Apr 23, 2014, 6:18 AM UTC

johne20 wrote: post #56

tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the HTML templating options for Golang particularly painful, is the subtext there. (I like Golang a lot; we did the bulk of microcorruption.com in it. But the web front end, which is a tiny amount of code, that's a Rails app.)

Ahh thanks. Yeah, almost all of the apps I have written lately are a rest/json api service in rails or golang (martini) and the client side code is angular, ios, etc. So I don't care nor use html templating in go.

What did you use for your db backend with Go? Gorp, beedb, database/sql, other? Just curious, as I've been looking at building some api's with go and martini lately.