Sorry for my ignorance, how is this different, better than Martini? What is the main goal of creating a new framework (instead of getting the features you are missing implemented in the currently existing ones)?
To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure it is better (I was hoping you would help me decide that!), and I wrote it mostly because every aspiring programmer writes a web framework at some point, and it was time I wrote mine (it was a lot of fun :) ).
But I think there's a good chance it is better.
First, I think one important difference is that Goji isn't full of magical reflection. If Go had support for method overloading, its entire interface is type-safe. In contrast, Martini does a lot of magical object injection, and it's not clear until runtime if your routes will even work, or what they'll even do, or where exactly the memory for them is coming from.
Second, I much prefer Goji's way of defining middleware. To me, middleware is like an onion (just like ogres!): each layer is a wrapper around the previous one. The way you write middleware in net/http is by wrapping the old http.Handler with a new one, and that's how I wanted Goji's middleware to work too. There's no magic "context.Next()", there's no magic dependency injection overrides, it's just http.Handlers all the way down.
Anyways, I'd like to know if you think I'm right: again, I'm really not sure this is actually better than Martini (or $YOUR_FAVORITE_FRAMEWORK), but I think it comes from a slightly different set of principles, and ones that I think are worth considering.
The fact that you're trying to stick with strong typing as much as possible is very appealing to me, and now I'm convinced to try to port my new project from Martini to Goji.
I think this is a good point to differentiate yourself on, and perhaps it should be included in your elevator pitch.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. I think using these slim web frameworks makes it easy to refactor your code or swap out the framework. I agree with some of the points you raised, but at this stage Martini has some very crucial features like model validations and sessions etc. I am pretty sure Goji gets those as time passes. Great work!
> Sorry for my ignorance, how is this different, better than Martini? What is the main goal of creating a new framework (instead of getting the features you are missing implemented in the currently existing ones)?
I truly do not understand this reasoning. Why build anything new at all if you can "improve" on something existing?
(the answers range from "because the existing doesn't facilitate the changes I would like to make" through to "learning experience", and everything in-between).
It is (thankfully) the opposite of this thinking that has given us the myriad of popular and useful web frameworks in other languages (Flask, web.py, Bottle, Sinatra, et. al) that all aim to solve different problems and/or offer differing levels of complexity/kitchen sink.
One of the huge benefits of contributing to existing projects is to fill in the missing holes. Off the bat I think goji is likely to be yet another web framework that someone picks up and builds insecure services with. Perhaps the time spent improving Martini would have been better than this?
Third, Goji is not magic. One of my favorite existing frameworks is Martini, but I rejected it in favor of building Goji because I thought it was too magical. Goji's web package does not use reflection at all, which is not in itself a sign of API quality, but to me at least seems to suggest it.
My comment was a little off hand and out of keeping with our standard, I apologize for that. Let me try to better explain myself:
There is a form of survival of the fittest taking place; new languages need frameworks for people to operate within. Those frameworks spring up, some work many some don't. You consolidate some into one, and then you build that out. It has won. Within it you have aspects that you want to change, so you contribute an alternative, to make those succeed you have to build clean interfaces. Once you reach this point you have a real framework: i.e. something opinionated about the relationship between varied modules.
Rails is, imho, the best example of this - it has had millions of hours of code contributed to it by the OSS world. It has reached maturity to the point where people wish to make it behave differently. They can do this because of that maturity.
When I see things like Goji, my frustrations are not at goji (again, I poorly expressed that in my initial statement - sorry) but rather at the fact that the initial ramp up period as described above is so inefficient. If you consolidate into one sooner then you're in a really good spot. From my POV golang already has a great micro-framework for web services - so why not invest the time in making that better? For example the graceful http server termination aspect (where goji shuts the listen socket down but services the remaining connections), why not contribute that? Why contribute routing?
RE: security. Recently I came across a piece that delved into the depths of why websites are insecure. The author made the compelling case that a great number of reasons for this is that most engineers do not understand web security, and in some ways that is down to the spread in frameworks - some handle security as a first class concern, others do not. The ones that do not are "easier to use", and so proliferate.
