GoRADD

A rapid Web application development framework for Go.

GoRADD is a monolithic web development framework for rapidly creating a web application from a concept in your mind and then allowing you to as easily as possible maintain that application through all the twists and turns of the change process. It is ideal for prototyping, intranet websites, websites that are very data intensive with many forms to gather information from users, websites that require the security and speed of a compiled language, websites with thousands of simultaneous users, and websites being maintained by one or a small group of developers. It is particularly good for developers new to GO and/or new to web development.

Installation

See the Quick Start guide to get started.

Requirements

• Go 1.21 or greater
• A supported database up and running on your local development computer. Current supported databases are:
  • Mysql
  • Postgres

For Developing GoRADD itself

• Sass (to build the css files from the scss source)

Goals

1. 80-20 rule, where out of the box GoRADD will do most of the hard work of building a website, and will quickly get you a working website, but not necessarily one that you will want to ship. GoRADD is architected to allow you to make changes and plug in other open-source software as you need.
2. Incremental changes. Most development processes go through a lengthy requirement analysis process, followed by a design process, and a lengthy build process, only to find out that what you built wasn't really what was needed. Instead, GoRADD gets you a working website quickly, and then lets you build out your application incrementally. It tries to make it easy to restructure your website, even at the data structure level, and have your changes filter through your application quickly without requiring a complete rewrite.
3. Layered development. GoRADD has its code, you have your code, and then there is an in-between interface that changes over time. GoRADD uses code generation to create this interface, and clearly delineates the code that you can change to modify the interface, vs. code that it will generate as you change your data model. The result is a product that is easy to change as your world and requirements change.
4. Most development happens in GO. What the user does in the browser is mirrored on the server, which allows you to work in a way that feels like you are building a desktop application. This makes your developers more productive and it allows you to build your app using common GO tools like the built-in unit test environment and documentation server. You can still work in javascript if you want to or need to do custom UI work, but often you don't have to.
5. Stability. We want to build applications that real people use, and that means reliance on tried and true technologies that work on a broad range of browsers and servers, rather than technologies that require lots of Polyfills for emerging standards.
6. Progressive enhancement. If you use the provided widgets, you can create a website that works even if the client turns off Javascript. All major browsers are currently supported, but we hope to support Opera Mini as well.
7. Rich libraries of widgets. GoRADD provides standard widgets corresponding to basic html controls, and also provides Bootstrap widgets. If you have a particular css or javascript widget library you want to support, building the GoRADD interface is fairly easy to do, and the Bootstrap library included gives you a model to follow.
8. Scalability. GoRADD is architected for scalability. All user state information is serializable to key-value stores. You might need to build the interface to the particular key-value store you are interested in, but that is not difficult. Some specific issues to consider:
   1. GoRADD requires a MySQL or Postgres database at this point for your main data store. SQL is great for creating most common data structures, is great when you need to change your structure without destroying data, and is fast enough for most applications. However, all data access is done through a common API, so switching an application that is already written to another SQL database like Postgres, Oracle, or any other database is very straight-forward and is just a matter of implementing the database layer.
   2. GoRADD maintains the state of each user of the website in something we call the pagestate. The pagestate is serializable to any key-value store. Currently, only an in-memory store is provided, but writing an interface to any common key-value store is easy.
   3. Live updates work through a pub/sub mechanism. Goradd provides a single-server in-memory system out of the box, but its easy to switch to any other pub/sub mechanism, including distributed systems like pubnub, ally, google cloud messaging, etc. There are no payloads with the messages and traffic is minimal.

Future Goals

• Expand database drivers, including NoSQL support
• WebComponents. WebComponent architecture fits particularly well with goradd's architecture. However, WebComponents are not fully supported by all major browsers. As WebComponents gain traction, we hope to use them for future browser widgets.
• Automated generation of a REST Api, including generation of Flutter client code.

Anti-patterns

1. GoRADD's html server is not microservice based. While you can create microservices that serve parts of your application, at its core goradd is a monolithic framework that includes an ORM, an MVC architecture, and a basic control and form management library. That said, GoRADD is still very scalable.
2. Object-oriented. Some of goradd uses a code pattern that mirrors traditional object-oriented inheritance and gets around some of GO's limitations in this area, including implementing virtual functions. We have found this particularly useful in the control library. If you hate inheritance, goradd is not for you. If you don't mind it, but you still like object composition too, this is your place.
3. Code generation. GoRADD relies heavily on code generation, and in particular uses the related github.com/goradd/got template engine to generate code.

Acknowledgements

GoRADD is a port of the PHP framework QCubed. QCubed itself was a fork of the PHP framework written by Mike Ho called QCodo. Mike is the original mastermind of many of the concepts in GoRADD, like:

• A code-generated ORM
• The use of "nodes" to describe database entities AND the relationships between them.
• Code-generated CRUD forms to get you started.
• Scaffolding that separates code-generated code from developer code so that code-generation can continue throughout the life of the project.
• A lightweight javascript layer for processing events and actions through ajax.
• The formstate engine to mirror the state of html and javascript widgets on the server-side so that the server-side engineer has complete control over what is happening in the html without needing to write javascript.

GoRADD relies on a number of other open-source projects, including:

• Alex Edward's SCS Session Manager Library
• Akeda Bagus' Inflector Library
• Gorilla's Websocket Library
• Kenneth Shaw's Snaker Library
• Stretchr's testing library Testify
• Andy Balholm's Brotli Library
• Microcosm's injection prevention library Blue Monday
• Russ Ross's Markdown library Black Friday

GoRADD was created and is maintained by Shannon Pekary

Thanks To

JetBrains for use of the GoLand Go Editor

BrowserStack for automated browser testing tools