Go for Web Development

Overview

Go delivers speed, security, and developer-friendly tools for Web Applications

Go is designed to enable developers to rapidly develop scalable and secure web applications. Go ships with an easy to use, secure and performant web server and includes it own web templating library. Go has excellent support for all of the latest technologies from HTTP/2, to databases like MySQL, MongoDB and Elasticsearch, to the latest encryption standards including TLS 1.3. Go web applications run natively on Google App Engine and Google Cloud Run (for easy scaling) or on any environment, cloud, or operating system thanks to Go’s extreme portability.

Key Benefits

Deploy across platforms in record speed

For enterprises, Go is preferred for providing rapid cross-platform deployment. With its goroutines, native compilation, and the URI-based package namespacing, Go code compiles to a single, small binary—with zero dependencies—making it very fast.

Leverage Go’s out-of-the-box performance to scale with ease

Tigran Bayburtsyan, Co-Founder and CTO at Hexact Inc., summarizes five key reasons his company switched to Go:

  • Compiles into a single binary — “Using static linking, Go actually combining all dependency libraries and modules into one single binary file based on OS type and architecture.”

  • Static type system — “Type system is really important for large scale applications.”

  • Performance — “Go performed better because of its concurrency model and CPU scalability. Whenever we need to process some internal request, we are doing it with separate Goroutines which are 10x cheaper in resources than Python Threads.”

  • No need for a web framework — “In most of the cases you really don’t need any third-party library.”

  • Great IDE support and debugging — “After rewriting all projects to Go, we got 64 percent less code than we had earlier.”

Customer Brief introduction Projects using go
Caddy Caddy Caddy Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. Caddy offers greater memory safety than servers written in C. A hardened TLS stack powered by the Go standard library serves a significant portion of all Internet traffic.
Cloudflare Cloudflare Cloudflare Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. “Go is at the heart of CloudFlare’s services including handling compression for high-latency HTTP connections, our entire DNS infrastructure, SSL, load testing and more.”
gov.uk gov.uk gov.uk The simplicity and safety of the Go language were a good fit for the United Kingdom’s government’s HTTP infrastructure, and some brief experiments with the excellent net/http package convinced web developers they were on the right track. “In particular, Go’s concurrency model makes it absurdly easy to build performant I/O-bound applications.”

Get Started

Go books on web development

  • Buffalo

    A framework for rapid web development in Go, curating Go and JS libraries together.

  • Echo

    A high performance, extensible, and minimalist Go web framework

  • Flamingo

    A fast open-source framework based on Go with clean and scalable architecture

  • Gin

    A web framework written in Go, with a martini-like API.

  • Gorilla

    A web toolkit for the Go programming language.

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  • julienschmidt/httprouter

    A lightweight high performance HTTP request router

  • gorilla/mux

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

  • Chi

    A lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go HTTP services.

  • net/http

    A standard library HTTP package

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  • database/sql

    A standard library interface with driver support for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL, BigQuery and most SQL databases

  • mongo-driver/mongo

    The MongoDB supported driver for Go

  • elastic/go-elasticsearch

    An Elasticsearch client for Go

  • GORM

    An ORM library for Go

  • Bleve

    Full-text search and indexing for Go

  • CockroachDB

    An evolution of the database—architected for the cloud to deliver resilient, consistent, distributed SQL at scale

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  • gopherjs

    A compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.

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Courses

Projects

  • gopherjs, a compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.
  • Hugo, The world’s fastest framework for building websites
  • Mattermost, a flexible, open source messaging platform that enables secure team collaboration
  • Caddy, a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go