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Comment by cgag | Hacker News Reader

This is more or less the philosophy of the Clojure community when it comes to web frameworks. Not sure what you're reasons for using Go are, but if you're open to dynamic typing you would probably appreciate Clojure's emphasis on avoiding this kind of complexity.

Though to be honest I do see a decent amount of value in not rewritng form handling/validations/auth in a bunch of different ways.

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I like Clojure a lot, and if I was building a new web app today, I'd strongly consider using it instead of Rails (for what it's worth: Golang is great for JSON web services, but not IMO great for full-features web apps, even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it).

However, to talk myself out of using Rails, I'd need to convince myself that I would (a) be able to use Postgres and (b) would not be writing lots of SQL. I can write SQL, and have been writing it for a long time, and I know that writing and maintaining it slows me down.

There's no good Clojure ORM, is there?

"even if you're using something like Angular and a "single-page" type architecture; you pay a huge price in flexibility for it" Can you elaborate more on that statement? I use angular/golang api and rails/angular both often.

I find the HTML templating options for Golang particularly painful, is the subtext there.

(I like Golang a lot; we did the bulk of microcorruption.com in it. But the web front end, which is a tiny amount of code, that's a Rails app.)

Ahh thanks. Yeah, almost all of the apps I have written lately are a rest/json api service in rails or golang (martini) and the client side code is angular, ios, etc. So I don't care nor use html templating in go.

What did you use for your db backend with Go? Gorp, beedb, database/sql, other? Just curious, as I've been looking at building some api's with go and martini lately.

One solution might be to include a javascript runtime in your app such as monkey (https://github.com/idada/monkey) , load a javascript template framework like underscore.js(http://underscorejs.org/) into the runtime context and create a render function that takes a JSON string and template string as parameters. You can then write the return value back into your "http response".

It's a bit of a hack/convoluted solution but it allows you to make use of a few javascript template libraries which are IMHO more pleasant to work with.

When I wrote a single-page Angular app with a Go backend, we barely did any of the HTML generation on the Go side, basically just enough for AngularJS to take over, which was essentially just one index.html template. I found it worked really well as an AngularJS backend.

I previously did a multi-page using html/template and I found it a bit more painful, especially since at the time there wasn't a ready-to-use solution for dynamic template compilation during development and then static compilation in production. I'm not sure if there is now, but I haven't looked in quite some time.

As for the template html/template language itself I've kind of grown to like it, but maybe that's just me ;)

Check out - http://sqlkorma.com/

The short answer is no. There's honeysql which basically lets you express sql in terms of Clojure's datastructures so you can get more reuse than you can with straight SQL strings, but it's not really an ORM as I understand it.

There isn't one cohesive solution.

I imagine most people evolve helper functions around https://github.com/clojure/java.jdbc and then use something like https://github.com/jkk/honeysql or http://sqlkorma.com/ for generating actual select query SQL.

It seems to me that Rails' main advantage over Clojure+microframeworks for web development is the ability to use mature libraries to handle common tasks: user management with devise, for example.

Don't forget it is trivial to call Java libraries from Clojure which for breadth, quality and maturity eclipse all the other platforms.

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