13 Building a web framework

The Preceding twelve chapters describe how to develop web applications in Go, introducing a lot of basic knowledge, development tools and techniques. In this chapter, we will be using this knowledge to implement a simple web framework. The first section of this chapter will take you through the planning and design stage of building a web framework. We’ll look at leveraging the MVC pattern as well as designing program execution flow, among other things. The second section will describe the first feature of our framework: Routing; namely, how to map URLs to processing logic. Then in the third section, we describe the processing logic itself, which involves designing generic controllers, and how to handle requests and return responses after inheriting from an object handler. Next, we describe some of the auxiliary functionality common to most web frameworks, such as log processing, information configuration, etc. Finally, we’ll implement a simple blogging system on top of our framework which will demonstrate the application logic necessary for publishing, modifying, deleting, and displaying lists of blog posts.

By seeing first-hand how to implement such a complete project from scratch, you will hopefully have a better understanding of the inner workings of Go web applications. You’ll be comfortable building your own project directory structures, implementing URL routers and utilizing MVC, among other aspects of web development. Among the frameworks prevalent today, MVC is no longer a myth. It’s not uncommon to hear programmers arguing about which frameworks are good and which are bad, which is often too shallow of an approach. Frameworks are only tools, and some tools are more suitable for certain applications than others. There are no universally good or bad tools. Thus, by teaching yourself how to write a framework from scratch, you will be able to tailor-make the perfect tool to best realize your ideas!