As someone who is also really enjoying Go, I think you need to add a huge, gigantic disclaimer before making a statement like this: Go's ecosystem of web development packages is in its infancy. You're not going to find any super-well-documented, super mature/stable web frameworks (thought a few are showing great promise). and some of the individual components (for example, Gorilla) are looking very good, but still have some more cooking to do.
I love the language, but let's not get too carried away until the ecosystem grows. The reality is, if you're going to use Go for web dev, you're going to need to be prepared to do a whole lot of things on your own.
I've read about the limitation of Go in terms of third party libs, but I believe it is only temporary. I had a glance at the std libs, looks really good for a new language. Our new app doesn't require all the bells and whistles of a full fledged framework.
>>I've read about the limitation of Go in terms of third party libs
Must not be looking on github... Yes its new, but in a majority of cases I have not had any trouble finding third party libraries and the std ones are wide and excellent.
(Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to Go). I tried Revel out a little while ago, and found it awesome at first. It felt like it could have the potential to dramatically speed up the development of Go web apps. I like the server and hotswapping features a lot, for instance.
But at the moment unfortunately I don't think it's very mature. Support for interacting with the DB, arguably the most important part of a web application, is pretty lacking IMO for something that otherwise wants to be an end-to-end solution.
In one of the examples I noticed that all kinds of interaction with the DB was being done in the Controller, not the Model. Which just seems wrong to me (at first I thought it was a "Play" framework thing, since Revel is modeled on that, but Play uses Hibernate for an ORM in its models). Also, you'll have to roll your own support for interacting with the DB using, say, gorp: https://github.com/coopernurse/gorp
That being said, robfig seems like a really cool dude, and he was responsive on github when I needed some help. The documentation is pretty great too.
I've been meaning to get one of the examples setup and just play around with it. To be perfectly honest I'm relatively new to the world of databases and such (I've been using RoR for some projects if that explains why), so tackling that gorp will be another awesome learning experience. Thanks!
how easy is to use GO with other frameworks, let's say PHP?
Would it be possible to write an application that uses PHP for some tasks, so you can benefit from the speed of GO and the the maturity of PHP?
You'll be better off writing raw PHP without classes than using Go. Go performances are raw Go. As soon as you add any framework to the party , the perfs are falling. see the gorilla test which is a Go framework.
Gorilla is a toolkit, not a framework. It's nice, but it doesn't do all that much beyond the standard library. To me, Go+Gorilla vs raw Go is not similar to, say, a PHP framework vs raw PHP.
(I know what Gorilla is, I've contributed to it :D)
The OP, to which I was replying, said: "see the gorilla test which is a Go framework."
I asked about the Gorilla benchmark itself, since OP seemed to say that adding something like Gorilla would slow down the Go benchmarks, which I don't agree with.
I love the language, but let's not get too carried away until the ecosystem grows. The reality is, if you're going to use Go for web dev, you're going to need to be prepared to do a whole lot of things on your own.