Golang is an exciting new language seeing rapid adoption in an increasing number of high profile domains. Its flexibility, simplicity, and performance makes it an attractive option for fields as diverse as web development, networking, cloud computing, and DevOps. Here are five great tools in the thriving ecosystem of Go libraries and frameworks.
Martini
Martini is a web framework that touts itself as “classy web development”, offering neat, simplified web application development. It serves static files out of the box, injects existing services in the Go ecosystem smoothly, and is tightly compatible with the HTTP package in the native Go library. Its modular structure and support for dependency injection allows developers to add and remove functionality with ease, and makes for extremely lightweight development. Out of all the web frameworks to appear in the community, Martini has made the biggest splash, and has already amassed a huge following of enthusiastic developers.
Gorilla
Gorilla is a toolkit for web development with Golang and offers several packages to implement all kinds of web functionality, including URL routing, optionality for cookie and filesystem sessions, and even an implementation with the WebSockets protocol, integrating it tightly with important web development standards.
groupcache
groupcache is a caching library developed as an alternative (or replacement) to memcached, unique to the Go language, which offers lightning fast data access. It allows developers managing data access requests to vastly improve retrieval time by designating a group of its own peers to distribute cached data. Whereas memcached is prone to producing an overload of database loads from clients, groupcache enables a successful load out of a huge queue of replicated processes to be multiplexed out to all waiting clients. Libraries such as Groupcache have a great value in the Big Data space as they contribute greatly to the capacity to deliver data in real time anywhere in the world, while minimizing potential access pitfalls associated with managing huge volumes of stored data.
Doozer
Doozer is another excellent tool in the sphere of system and network administration which provides a highly available data store used for the coordination of distributed servers. It performs a similar function to coordination technologies such as ZooKeeper, and allows critical data and configurations to be shared seamlessly and in real time across multiple machines in distributed systems. Doozer allows the maintenance of consistent updates about the status of a system across clusters of physical machines, creating visibility about the role each machine plays and coordinating strategies for failover situations. Technologies like Doozer emphasize how effective the Go language is for developing valuable tools which alleviate complex problems within the realm of distributed system programming and Big Data, where enterprise infrastructures are modeled around the ability to store, harness and protect mission critical information.
GoLearn
GoLearn is a new library that enables basic machine learning methods. It currently features several fundamental methods and algorithms, including neural networks, K-Means clustering, naïve Bayesian classification, and linear, multivariate, and logistic regressions. The library is still in development, as are the number of standard packages being written to give Go programmers the ability to develop machine learning applications in the language, such as mlgo, bayesian, probab, and neural-go. Go’s continual expansion into new technological spaces such as machine learning demonstrates how powerful the language is for a variety of different use cases and that the community of Go programmers is starting to generate the kind of development drive seen in other popular general purpose languages like Python. While libraries and packages are predominantly appearing for web development, we can see support growing for data intensive tasks and in the Big Data space. Adoption is already skyrocketing, and the next 3 years will be fascinating to observe as Golang is poised to conquer more and more key territories in the world of technology.