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Comment by redneckbeard | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand the argument that we should all just use HandlerFuncs for everything. Python and Ruby have stdlib HTTP facilities that are pretty good. They aren't nearly as nice as net/http, but you could totally build websites with them. People still have written lots of web frameworks, because it makes their lives easier. It lets them express programs in a simpler, higher-level way. I feel like this is even more valid now in 2013 since nearly anyone who's building websites has done so with one of those high-level frameworks, and they expect a similar experience.

Lots of people have abandoned Rails for Sinatra, or Django for Flask. That's totally cool, and there are good reasons to do so. There are also very good and obvious reasons to use something that further abstractions common patterns if the software you are building conforms reasonably well to those patterns.

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> feel like this is even more valid now in 2013 since nearly anyone who's building websites has done so with one of those high-level frameworks, and they expect a similar experience.

But in 2013 do I really want to use server side HTML tempalating? Why not just connect a webservice to a HTML/JS presentation layer like I am suggesting? If all you are doing is building a webservice then the abstractions beyond net/http + Gorilla are not buying you much IMHO, but they do come at quite a performance cost: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...

My first couple Go web applications did things the html/template way and were structured on the way I used to go JSF applications- but since I switched to the above approach my projects have been better performing, faster to develop , better scaling and easier to maintain. As we all know, we seldom get all those things in one technology choice without trade-offs.

You have a point, no pun intended. Focusing on serving up tidy endpoints does away with a lot of complexity (I call shenanigans on the performance argument, especially if you're using Go and not Python/Ruby) - the only unsolved technical debt with this approach would be making GoogleBot happy. If you don't need to care about making crawlers happy this can be great...

On the other hand, the complexity you're punting on needs to go somewhere, so now you'll need to muck about with something like Angular to make up for it. Difficult choices. It kind of continuously feels like we're on the edge of Nirvana with this stuff and something perfect in its elegance will emerge. I'm only 24 but this seems like a dangerous siren song to me... maybe we should all know better by this point, eh?

But in 2013 do I really want to use server side HTML tempalating?

Many people do yes. It may seem old-fashioned but when I load a web page I don't want to sit looking at a 'loading' message or a progress bar before I even see the content as json is turned into html, and I'd rather all the logic was server side and a flat page was served to a web client (browser).

I don't agree doing rendering server-side necessarily means a significant performance cost, or is harder to maintain or slower to develop, why do you think that is the case? Caching and a server-side framework can make things far faster and easier, depending on what you are doing, and raw speed of rendering is not often an issue nowadays anyway.

I'm not sure what the test you pointed to there was showing, because using Go to output json could be done with a framework too by just bypassing the framework, in exactly the same way. It hardly seems a relevant test, and there were other issues in those tests when I looked at them previously - like comparing wildcard routes in one test to hard coded ones in another. Comparing bare JSON production with go to JSON production with webgo (do people use webgo?) is hardly very useful or a fair comparison. It would be trivial to make those equal in speed and I suspect the diff will just be down to different routing and/or template rendering. In addition, I don't want clients to see JSON, so the rendering speed of that is pretty irrelevant, what matters to most people is when html finishes rendering.

It would be interesting to hear the reasons behind the string of assertions in your penultimate sentence, are you sure all types of app would benefit equally from your approach? Can you describe the advantages as you see them to this approach?

>It may seem old-fashioned but when I load a web page I don't want to sit looking at a 'loading' message or a progress bar

This is how bad implementations look to users, consider something like Gmail as a counter example however...

>would be interesting to hear the reasons behind the string of assertions in your penultimate sentence

Sure:)

>are you sure all types of app would benefit equally from your approach?

Of course I am not, I didn't make a that claim. I think most typical applications benefit, it has worked well for me. I was asking questions to understand the point of view I don't hold-

> Can you describe the advantages as you see them to this approach?

  In this approach: 
  Performance:
    1. Most assets are (server side) static
    2. They are pre-gzipped and stored in memory using a little reusable code I wrote.
    3. They are extremely cache friendly
  Better scaling:
    1. Only a fraction of the previous work happens server side... You using your users compute power.
    2. You are transfering less data.
  Faster to develop/easier to maintain:
    1. This way you have two differnt apps that happen to talk to eachother. This makes it easy to replace one or the other.
    2. Responsibilities are clearly defined. This makes brining new people up to speed easier and makes thingse asier to test, debug, etc.

Thanks for the comments, it'd be easier to read if they weren't styled using pre!

Of course I am not, I didn't make a that claim.

Sorry, I should have phrased that differently as something like - perhaps not all types of app would benefit equally? I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth. I do think it's a little early to start asking why anyone would use server-side logic any more, there is room for both approaches :)

Perhaps if you are serving data which is text-only, static and fits well into json as you describe, and don't mind coding in Javascript, client-side is a better fit. If you have a lot of server-side data and editing/auth requirements (more of a CMS), and depend on heavily nested templates etc, server-side may be a better fit, though I'm sure it's possible to handle every type of website in theory using either system. There is also the question of which language you prefer to work in - personally I'd rather keep JS use to a minimum, as it's pretty gnarly.

Re the separation of concerns, yes this is a valid point and is something you gain from serving an API if you have a complex system, though it is possible to have a back-end behind a traditional web framework too, with one side being the API serving json or whatever and a separate user-facing service serving HTML.

I don't think speed or caching are a big problem with server-side frameworks nowadays though, and I'd rather use a language like Go than JS to produce web apps. Out of curiosity, which client-side frameworks are you using?

I think we agree more than we disagree. Maybe we just differ on which approach is our default one. I dislike JS as well and will be switching to Dart on the front end when I feel it is ready.

>though it is possible to have a back-end behind a traditional web framework too.

Sure I think you get a lot of the maintainability pro's this way, but loose on some of the performance ones.

I mostly write systems software (in Go), but when I write webapps I use angular.js (frontend) + Go (backend) + One of many datastores (ex MySQL, Postgre, LevelDB etc)

> This is how bad implementations look to users, consider something like Gmail as a counter example however...

Gmail isn't a counterexample to the "loading" message thing. It manages to be slow on hardware and network connections that are incredibly fast.

Use of gadget/template is totally optional. The _primary_ use case for Gadget is RESTful web services. That's why you can route to a resource, and have the appropriate controller methods hit by the correct HTTP verbs. The reason to provide support for HTML rendering on the server is no different than providing plaintext rendering: it's really really easy. It's almost free.

Why do folks downvote civil open-minded discussion? I always assumed downvotes were for bad behavior or trolling. Is there an official position on the use of downvotes?

I'm not sure that angular apps are quicker to develop for the average internal application yet, for example. The primary issue is that we haven't quite figured out patterns to handle business logic via web service in a way that doesn't duplicate effort on server and client side. At least, I haven't seen it yet.

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