goji

akefile Go wants me to throw this away and structure it like this: $HOME go bin [...] src github.com BurntSushi toml [...] zenazn goji [...] myaccount myproject .git main.go stuff.go assets photo.png something.xml scripts setup_database.sh config config.sample.json Dockerfile Makefile I'm supposed to work within this jungle of dependencies and generated files, in the middle of which sits my project. At least Java, for all its many faults, has the good sense to let you store dependencies nested as JAR files in a subfolder, as opposed to turning your own project into a dependency. I have tried fixing this by symlinking my project into $GOPATH/src/whatever, but Go doesn't let me to run "go" commands on things outside the $GOPATH, which makes this rather painful to do in a shell. Adding to the general confusion, Go doesn't manage canonical package paths, so github.com/zenazn/goji/main.go is in the package "goji" and github.com/zenazn/goji/graceful/[asterisk].go are in the package "graceful", but those package names only mean something to the importer. When "goji" wants to use the package "graceful", it imports "github.com/zenazn/goji/graceful", which, being a full URL, must be resolved from a root folder in GOPATH/src. At least Java (for all its... etc.) had the good sense to make dotted package names mirror the folder structure of a project, not URL, thus being internally consistent. Go wants everything to live in the same sea of things. Vendoring is just half the problem.

al" context type like Goji does. Since the library makes no statements about the sorts of fields you have or their types, applications have to do a bunch of shenanigans with type casts in order to extract the typed values they expect. The upside here, however, is the standardization and what that allows. I've found that in most of the web applications I've built, only a small fraction of the middleware is authored by me: I end up pulling in the standard request logging middleware, or the middleware that assigns request IDs, or the middleware that does CSRF protection. There's a huge amount of value in being able to write (read: "let someone else write") those middlewares once and being able to use them in any application. With arbitrary application-provided structs, this isn't possible [1], but if you can instead standardize on types and keys out-of-band, you can mix and match arbitrary middleware with impunity. This alone is one of those awkward engineering tradeoffs where you're exchanging one nice thing (application-level type safety) for another (standard interface, and hopefully an ecosystem of drop-in middleware), and given just this I'd argue that the ecosystem is probably more important. But the frosting on this particular cake is that, with only marginally more awkwardness, you can actually get application-level type safety too: look at what I did for the request ID middleware that ships with Goji, for instance (https://github.com/zenazn/goji/blob/master/web/middleware/re...). Again, it's not quite as nice as a user-defined struct, but in the grand scheme of tradeoffs and sacrifices, I don't think it's so terribly bad. So TL;DR, Goji chose standardization and composability in the design of its context object over application type safety, but if you're willing to write a few helper functions I don't think you end up losing the type safety anyways. [1]: actually, come to think of it, with a lot of reflection and some struct tags you could probably pull it off. (Something like "struct { RequestID string `context:"reqid"`}", and the request ID assigning middleware would hunt around for a string field tagged "reqid"). But it seems like it'd introduce a lot of coupling between middleware and the application which I'm not sure will turn out well—any time a middleware needed a bit of extra storage, every application would have to change. In any event, if someone builds this I'd love to play around with it.