4 Things to Consider When Choosing a Go API Framework

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • mux

    Discontinued A powerful HTTP router and URL matcher for building Go web servers with 🦍

    Eli Bendersky has an excellent series where they walk you through building a REST API in Go by first starting with the standard library and then introducing a router such as gorilla or chi and finally switching over to using a complete web framework. This series shows some of the downsides of sticking with the standard library entirely and how extra libraries such as the two router packages above can be extremely helpful.

  • chi

    lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go HTTP services

    Eli Bendersky has an excellent series where they walk you through building a REST API in Go by first starting with the standard library and then introducing a router such as gorilla or chi and finally switching over to using a complete web framework. This series shows some of the downsides of sticking with the standard library entirely and how extra libraries such as the two router packages above can be extremely helpful.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • Echo

    High performance, minimalist Go web framework

    This can be extremely helpful if you just want to get going and start writing the business logic of your application without having to worry about some of these implementation details however it does come with a price: you're mostly stuck with the framework's choices. Don't like the way that echo formats logs? Tough. Want to use a different router than the one chosen by buffalo? Good Luck.

  • Buffalo

    Discontinued Rapid Web Development w/ Go

    This can be extremely helpful if you just want to get going and start writing the business logic of your application without having to worry about some of these implementation details however it does come with a price: you're mostly stuck with the framework's choices. Don't like the way that echo formats logs? Tough. Want to use a different router than the one chosen by buffalo? Good Luck.

  • Gin

    Gin is a HTTP web framework written in Go (Golang). It features a Martini-like API with much better performance -- up to 40 times faster. If you need smashing performance, get yourself some Gin.

    If however, the project maintainers don't seem to have a good rapport with the community, or they don't respond very often to issues or discussions, this could mean that you may find yourself waiting for an answer or bugfix to be merged should you choose that particular framework. GitHub's somewhat overlooked pulse view can help show how active a project is and how often issues are opened and closed.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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