Alexander Infante

Alexander Infante

Programming with Gin (and Go)

I'm a big fan of Gin. By Gin, I am referring to the drink, there's this great spot called Bibo Ergo Sum next to me that would serve this amazing Gin based drink with a lot of other ingredients in it. I am looking forward to returning when it's safe.

I also really like Gin, the micro-framework for writing REST APIs in Go. I would weigh both equally (as you can imagine, I really like building out APIs). There's something very satisfying about using Postman and getting the request response you want and writing in a way that can easily scale, which Go is incredible at. There is this great article about a company drastically reducing their servers provisioned just by switiching to Go.

Most of my experience has been with Node.js (up to this point), so I am familiar with Express and creating a REST API with object oriented middleware applied to the data as it's passed from the HTTP request, to the database (or however I choose to use the data), and the response to the client side. Node.js' event loop and non-blocking I/O is great, but it is admittedly less clean than Go's built in concurrency model (known as GoRoutines). Keep in mind that concurrency is not parallelism.

The basic framework for how the Gin micro-framework works with Go is as follows:

Request -> Route Parser & Handler -> Middleware -> Response

Now for some basic Hello World Example (keep in mind- this is not for best practices, just a simple example to get up and running):

  1. The basic setup: 
import (
  "fmt"
  "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
)

func main () {
  r := gin.Default()
  r.Run()
  fmt.Println("Server Listening...")
}
  1. Adding Routing (simple GET Request)
func main () {
  r := gin.Default()

  r.GET("/", GetMiddleware)

  r.Run()
  fmt.Println("Server Listening...")
}
  1. Defining Your Middleware (simplge GET Request)
func GetMiddleware (c *gin.Context) {
  c.JSON(200, gin.J{
    "message": "Hello from your Go Gin API!"
  })
}
  1. Putting It All Together
import (
  "fmt"
  "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
)

func GetMiddleware (c *gin.Context) {
  c.JSON(200, gin.J{
    "message": "Hello from your Go Gin API!"
  })
}

func main () {
  r := gin.Default()
  r.GET("/", GetMiddleware)
  r.Run()
  fmt.Println("Server Listening...")
}

This is a pretty basic example just to get people up and running with Go and Gin. There are great docs that can teach a lot more in depth about what is going on. I do plan on writing quite a bit more about Go and the benefits it brings.

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