Top 8 Web Frameworks in Golang for Development

Hemendra Singh
Hemendra Singh, Managing Director at The NineHertz
Published on Jun 19, 2019 in Web Developers Resources
Top 8 Web Frameworks in Golang for Development

From the very beginning, Golang enjoyed widespread popularity among the development community. It has become a powerful and the most popular option to write APIs and web services. The survey results conducted in December 2016, found that 89% of the total of 3595 respondents decided to choose Google’s Go Programming Language or Golang for their work. Based on expertise and preference, Golang has ranked the highest among all web programming languages. In 2017, Golang ranked 10th in Tiobe’s Programming Language of the Year. This is a significant jump from 55th position previous year. Golang is attracting professionals from various disciplines because of the ease of using Go.

Google’s Go Programming Language is quick, in the sense, it can be compiled to quick running native code. Several web app development company USA and the world over including PHP Web Development companies have found this feature interesting. When a development company Hires PHP web Developers, they want them to get productive as fast as they can. Golang is easy to start even for beginner developers. No wonder, Golang or Google’s Go Programming Language has become the main choice for the mainstream users from the time it was launched.

Golang helps developers create proficient, dependable, and simple software because it is open-source and compiled programming Language. This is the reason Go has a wide and increasing array of users. Golang built from ground up for concurrency and scalability. It also paves the way for better optimizations. Using Golang, you can write efficient programs with less line of codes. Writing robust APIs without taking a toll on its performance has become easier. And unique APIs without compromising on quality and functionality. Golang is a compiled language that performs code check prior to the runtime.

Here is a quick compilation of the top frameworks for development in Golang. Save this article or bookmark it so that you can come back whenever you need them.

Martini

Martini is extremely lean and light. Very easy to integrate with third-party support. The flexibility to extend the capabilities with the additional libraries makes incredibly lean Martini code base to magnify and leverage its functionality to become something more than just its components. The additional third-party support makes Martini act more like an ecosystem rather than behave like a framework.

The design of Martini is meant to do a lot of work with a minimal amount of overhead. In terms of performance, it stands somewhere between enterprise and small team programming that offers good scalability. Martini was developed for writing modular web applications and services in Golang.

It also enjoys a wide range of support for routing methodologies and formats. It offers support for wildcards, regex stricture, variable parameters and more. All of this makes Martini more powerful than Gin, especially considering the overhead.

Martini has already been around for some time. There is a good amount of documentation and a large install base. For any issues related to Martini, chances are it’s been answered.

Gin Gonic

Gin is designed to deliver a very minimalistic, trimmed down framework. It carries only the most essential features, libraries, and functionalities making it extremely lean. This is a major plus point for frameworks like Gin.

Gin follows simple and succinct design ethos which is apparent from the documentation. Gin is a great framework to start with. It is also easier in terms of debugging and issue tracking.

Just as a side note, Gin was designed with Martini, which is another framework (described above). Gin uses HTTP router for its traffic handling. This increases the speed by over 40 times than Martini framework. It’s a good choice between spartan code and speed.

Buffalo

Don’t go by the canny name Buffalo. In reality, this can get you started quickly. It is simple and easy to build a web application with Buffalo. When you start a new project, Buffalo has everything you need to get started. From front-end to back-end development, everything is already set-up for you.

Buffalo features Hot Reloading. This means dev command will watch your .go and .html files automatically. This will also rebuild and restart your binary. Once you run the dev command, you’ll see the changes go live right before your eyes.

It is more than just a framework. It offers a complete holistic web development ecosystem which lets you get straight to building your application.

Web.go

Web.go is a very lightweight framework. It offers additional functionality over Go because of the tree routing system. Web.go is a much more efficient system compared to simple list routing. This is because it allows for routing via relationships rather than purpose or usage. This results in an ultimate lightweight, efficient, and easy to use the framework with impressive gains in routing efficiencies.

Web.go is designed from the ground up to be very basic. It is spartan by choice. Therefore any additional features will not change Web.go in any significant way, especially in terms of the underlying codebase size or requirements.

Goji

This is another lightweight and fast web framework with composability and simplicity as its main features. Just like net/HTTP.ServeMux, you will find Goji to be a minimalistic HTTP request multiplexer. The framework includes Einhorn support, making it possible for you to have WebSocket support in Goji.

Goji also include URL patterns, graceful shutdown, re-configurable middleware stack, and much more. You can use the framework in production. It has proved its worth by serving billions of requests across several organizations.

Gorilla

It is a perfect example of scalability through modularity, representing both ease and efficacy of such a situation. The framework can drop packages, enable modules, tie in new extensions, and do a lot more, without sacrificing the core functionality of the framework itself. This is the main reason why Gorilla has been adopted by both enterprise and small scale groups.

It offers native support of WebSockets. This essentially means that Gorilla is ready to go out of the box. However only with additional methodologies and approaches such as HTTP routing, arbitrary functions and, URL schemas serving as additional routing mechanisms for both new and established web.

Gocraft

It is a minimalistic framework which offers fast and scalable routing performance. Gocraft is a Go mux and middleware package with casting and reflection capabilities to help you type your code statically. Gocraft also allows you to add optional functionality with the built-in middleware or you can write your own. Gocraft adds routing to the net/http package from the standard library. Gocraft makes for a great choice if performance is one of the top concerns for you. It makes it very easy to write backend web applications with the Gocraft framework.

Beego

Beego offers a fully featured framework which lends much of its development conceptualization and approach from Revel. Even though Beego is lean for what it does, it is an all-inclusive framework. That's why you will find Beego offering a wide feature set for what ultimately is not a big code base.

Beego comes with “Bee tool” which possesses awesome functionality that checks for automated changes to the codebase. It performs automated functions depending on those changes. You can configure Bee tool to automatically build new revisions, archive function changes, and more.

All the great functionality of Beego doesn’t stop there. It also comes with a great ORM system in place that paves the way for modeling relations and resources in a highly effective manner. This leads to faster processing and better traffic routing.

Take away

If you’re a web app development company in the USA or from anywhere around the globe, you need to learn some new programming concepts such as coroutines, strict typing with compilation, interfaces, channels, structs, pointers, and some other differences. However, with enough tinkering, you’ll find Golang much easier and faster to use.

As with any PHP Web Development, Golang is much a consideration of what is best for your needs. All of the frameworks described above come with their own set of pros and cons. But you need to take them with a pinch of salt because each of those pros and cons is very much opinion driven and could vary depending on your requirement. Many disregard the complexity topic in favor of abstraction. There are also others who ignore verbosity as an issue. But at the end of the day, regardless of where you stand on a given topic, you will find some features as a common ground that is beneficial to the point that you would want to adopt it for your next project.

For enterprise solutions, you should always go with the framework that enjoys a strong community base and well-proven third-party implementations. This will make any shortcomings easier to deal with. Especially when you are dealing with hardware that negates many of the processing overhead shortcomings.

However, for smaller solutions, you can try something like Beego. If you are looking for a smaller but more mature system, you can either go with Gin or Martini. Both are good choices. On the other end of the spectrum, Web.go and Gorilla are good frameworks if you want little more than Go, but not keen at fully featured out of the box framework. Goji is excellent for implementing WebsSockets via Einhorn. There are also better choices that require slightly more overhead and effort. In crux, the decision for the right framework should always follow the project requirement.

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About the author
Hemendra SinghManaging Director at The NineHertz

Hemendra Singh is Managing Director and co-founder of The NineHertz, a Mobile App Development Company. Hemendra has a keen interest in the latest trends and technologies that are emerging in different domains. Being an entrepreneur in the field of IT...

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