I Don’t Like Go’s Default HTTP Handlers

• web-util

  1 3 10.0 Go

  Useful abstraction above the http.Handler interface. Clean handlers without early returns

I was in the same camp as you a few years ago and also wrote an utility to handle this. Might be of any interest to you.

https://github.com/barthr/web-util

• ring

  15 3,708 8.4 Clojure

  Clojure HTTP server abstraction

  

> In the HTTP handlers it makes sense that you don't have return values, because: What would you do with that value exactly?

I think that approach used by clojure's ring shows an elegant way to represent http responses https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring/wiki/Concepts#responses. They are essentially structs with the following fields:

status := number

headers := map of string->string

body := stream | string | seq | inputstream

Request handlers are handed a request struct that is similar. The handler is a function that maps a request to a response (it doesn't actually write to streams itself).

I like this style for an http library for a couple of reasons:

1. HTTP resources can be viewed as functions whose domain is the request, and range is the response. Having the abstraction match that makes for really nice code.

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• ntfy

  288 16,646 9.6 Go

  Send push notifications to your phone or desktop using PUT/POST

• oapi-codegen

  65 5,206 9.1 Go

  Generate Go client and server boilerplate from OpenAPI 3 specifications

  

The low level HTTP library is phenomenal for building more friendly packages on top, think of it as assembly language for HTTP in go. What isn't obvious about that Go http design is that it's very parallel. Your callback gets invoked in a goroutine for each request, so you can write easy to understand code, linearly, without worrying about things like promises or callbacks or message queues.

I'm opinionated here, because I also think all API's should be built starting from a spec, such as OpenAPI, and to that end, I've written a library to do just that, generate models and echo handlers from API specs, and other contributors have added gin, chi, etc [1]

1: https://github.com/deepmap/oapi-codegen

• httperroryzer

  2 24 0.0 Go

  Static analyzer to catch invalid uses of http.Error without a return statement which can cause expected bugs

  

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