goa VS sqlx

My experience of Golang is that dependency injection doesn't really have much benefit. It felt like a square peg in a round hole exercise when my team considered it. The team was almost exclusively Java/Typescript Devs so it was something that we thought we needed but I don't believe we actually missed once we decided to not pursue it.

If you are looking at OpenAPI in Golang I can recommend having a look at https://goa.design/. It's a DSL that generates OpenAPI specs and provides an implementation of the endpoints described. Can also generate gRPC from the same definitions.

We found this removed the need to write almost all of the API layer and a lot of the associated validation. We found the generated code including the server element to be production ready from the get go.

See https://goa.design/. It automates all the comms stuff, so you just write: 1) a design file showing your functions, 2) an implantation of those functions, and 3) a very generic "main.go" (basically the same for all your services) that decides "how is this exposed over gRPC or REST or other comms?". The rest of the code is generated.

Perhaps the easiest way to find out how to do something (especially when using Meta) is to search the test cases when you have cloned the source code.

If you really need a framework, you can take a look at Echo or, for a contract-first approach, https://goa.design/

Few folks in here are (rightly) frustrated with the code generation story and broader tooling support around the OpenAPI standard. I've found a few alternative approaches quite nice to work with:

- Use a DSL to describe your service and have it spit out the OpenAPI spec as well as server stubs. In other words, I wouldn't bother writing OpenAPI directly - it's an artifact that is generated at build time. As a Go user, I quite like Goa (https://goa.design/) but there are others shared in here like TypeSpec.

- There are situations where sticking a backend-for-frontend (BFF) in front of APIs can yield great productivity boosts. For example, in the past we built a thin GraphQL proxy that calls out to a poorly structured REST API. Integrating with that was much more convenient. Most recently, I've been playing with a BFF built with tRPC (https://trpc.io/) which calls out to a REST API. It seemed to provide an even better experience if you use TypeScript on the front-end and in the BFF. It does not have a codegen step and I was really pleased with how fast I could iterate with it - granted it was a toy project.

One of the biggest issues I see is that you are using the same models for API as you are for the database. That wouldn’t fly in a real work system. And even though your doing simple CRUD I would introduce another layer for business logic. You should never have the Controller calling you database code directly. It never “stays” that simplistic. One of the easiest ways to deal with this is to use Goa. https://goa.design/ It takes care of generating your API models and it creates the Interfaces to implement for your business logic. Furthermore it creates OpenAPI documentation (something missing in this design that is a must for commercial development).

I left PHP for Go.

- with http://sqlc.dev I don't have to write ORM or model code anymore.

- with http://goa.design I can have well-documented API's that any team can generate a client for in any language. It also generates the HTTP JSON and gRPC servers for me so I can focus on my logic.

- with https://github.com/99designs/gqlgen I can define GraphQL revolvers that play well with sqlc (any RDBMS) or I can use a key-value store.

- speaking of key-value stores, Go allows them to be embedded! Even SQLite now has the https://litestream.io/ project to make it super simple to use a durable, always backed-up SQLite database even in a serverless context.

Go is faster, uses less memory, and has really-well designed stdlib without all the bugs I used to face trying to use the PHP stdlib.

Goa and Kong are some of the best frameworks to develop and deploy microservices. They provide features such as out-of-the-box support for service discovery, routing and authentication that make it easier to build more complex applications. There are also newer architectural frameworks with less steep learning curves like GPTDeploy that lets you build and deploy microservices with a single command.

Or the one we use at work: https://goa.design/ Goa does a lot more and maybe more than you need. We use it as it can generate both REST and gRPC as well as API models and OpenAPI documentation (JSON and YAML).

We've always used https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx which is just the standard package + mapping to/from structs.

You can use this https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx

I will be using sqlx to execute queries and map columns to struct fields and vice versa, sqlx is a library which provides a set of extensions on go's standard database/sql library.

sqlx + squirrel ftw

I'd rather suggest the use of tools more aligned with the core concepts of the language such as sqlx, which is an extension of the database/sql standard library. It allows you to use models/structs to map your tables but you have more control over the SQL statements you use to perform queries and the like. You can combine sqlx with Squirrel to build queries from composable parts.

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here

This is the same situation I saw 20 years ago. Back then, all the managers were pushing development in Oracle tools. Those managers grew up on Oracle and Java was too modern for them. Now the situation is similar. Managers used to do things in Java and now they are still pushing Java. In fact, today Java brings nothing but problems. When I see a new project starting on Java it is always some big desperation. For a comparison of Java and Go, just look at the documentation for SQL. For go: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql (31 pages) and maybe https://jmoiron.github.io/sqlx/ (12 pages). In Java only one class is 59 pages (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/sql/ResultSet.html) and look how many of those documents there are: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/13/docs/api/java.sql/java/sql/package-summary.html and on top of that we have javax.sql - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/javax/sql/package-summary.html And even then you use Hibernate for example, where the documentation has 11 manuals and of those the User Guide has 353 pages - https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/6.2/userguide/html\_single/Hibernate\_User\_Guide.html

sqlx