* A full ORM which generates tables from structs and allows relations between models, as well as a simple querying system based on Go functions which joins the tables automatically for you e.g.

   memeId := base36.Decode(param)
   var meme *Meme
   var template *Template
   err := ctx.Orm().One(orm.Eq("Meme|Id", memeId), &meme, &template)

* Inheritance based template system, with a declarative assets pipeline supporting compilation (e.g. it compiles coffescript to JS and less to CSS on demand - also pluggable). This is the base template from one of our apps:

   {{/*
      jquery|if=~ie-gte-9: 2.0.3
      jquery|if=ie: 1.10.2
      bootstrap|fontawesome=4.0.3: 3.0.0
      styles|bundle: css/style.css, lightbox/css/lightbox.css
      scripts|top,bundle: js/modernizr.js, js/detectizr.js
      scripts|bundle: js/responsiveslides.js, lightbox/js/lightbox-2.6.min.js, js/site.js
      analytics|nodebug: {{ $Config.Analytics }}
   */}}
    <!DOCTYPE html>
    ...
    {{ template "main" }}...

   {{/*
     extends: base.html
   */}} 
   {{ define "main" }}...

* Easy to use signed and encrypted cookies.

* Regular expression based URL routing.

* Functions for easily parsing input parameters.

* A development server which automatically rebuilds the source as it changes and reports compilation errors in the browser itself. While developing, runtime errors are also reported in the browser with complete backtraces and printing the values passed to each function. While running in production, those reports are sent by email to the project administrator(s).

* App-wide and low-level caching system with pluggable backends, currently supporting Redis and Memcache as well as a dummy backend for development.

* Form generator and validator from Go structs, with renderers for both Bootstrap and Foundation (renderers are also pluggable, so you could also write your own. We also support generating forms from multiple objects so you e.g. write an object which generates a captcha and include it in any form with a single line in code (in fact, we provide just that, but a simple numeric captcha a a full-blown recaptcha object). It also does automatic CSRF protection.

* A complete i18n system, which extracts strings from Go code and templates, generates .pot files which can be translated using any editor (or a specialized .po editor if you feel like it) and them compiles .po files back to Go code again. This makes packages with their translations "go-get-able".

* Periodic and background tasks which can either be scheduled or just started from any web request.

* A configuration package which takes a struct and fills it by parsing an optional configuration file as well as command line flags.

* Support for administrative commands, which can be executed from the command line or started remotely.

* Support for pluggable apps. e.g. we do have a "users" app which provides user registration, authentication and social integration. This can be included in any other app with a couple of lines of code (one line for the import, another line to tell our main app to include it). Included apps can do a lot of stuff, like inserting code in every template rendered by the parent app, including external assets like images, styles or scripts and even rendering their own templates contained inside your parent's app base template.

* Last but not least, a minimal overhead (in the range of 100ns per request) profiling framework which lets you know how much time a request spent in the cache, the orm, the template, e.g... as well as seeing how much each operation took (e.g. you can check how much time a SELECT took and also perform an EXPLAIN on it). Users can also define their own events and profile them by instrumenting their code (it usually requires just a line of code per resource, to indicate its name). You can also profile a live server by using a command line app included in the framework.

We also have helper and utility functions for the more mundane stuff and basically everything you could expect from a web framework. We took inspiration from Django, Tornado and Rails and tried to take the best of them while building this framework (I used to contribute to Tornado back in the day). We've been developing this internally for almost 2 years and it's now around 40KLOC of Go and a couple of K of coffescript, less and html.

Is this something like Rack (in Ruby on Rails)?

Also your templating system looks very similar to Handlebar/Mustache - is that what the general principles are going to be ?

I'm working on an arel-esque fluent SQL generator now: https://github.com/lann/squirrel

I'll release it once I'm a little more confident in the interface. Currently you can do things like this:

  rows, err :=
        Select("col").
        From("tab").
        Where("x = ?", 1).
        RunWith(db).Query()

Release it now! I've said the same thing in the past about some code I was working on. Add a little readme, explicitly say it is a work in progress, and get it out there. At the very least the rush of publicizing something will push your drive to work on this codebase, and you might even gain some contributors. I'd rather use a repo that is obviously a work in progress but has active contributions from the creator over some more 'complete' but stagnant repo any day.

rows, err := db.execute("SELECT col FROM tab WHERE x = ?", 1);

There are other features I haven't shown here as well, like building an IN expression with placeholders from a slice.

By the way, my sideproject is about getting financial data from sources like Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, et cetera. You can find it here: https://github.com/aktau/gofinance

I can highly recommend https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx which allows you to easily unpack results into structs/maps, or pass in a struct/map and insert it (using struct tags + named queries). If you're writing a CRUD application this covers a lot of the basics. There's also https://github.com/eaigner/jet which is a 'micro ORM' (and very light on the ORM part).

> "html/template" doesn't support things like inheritance, didn't even support comparison operators until Go 1.2, etc.

I grew to like html/template over time, but the lack of comparison operators pre Go 1.2 was a huge sore point and I had I been working on this little project a year ago I'd have been extremely frustrated. The lack of inheritance was a bit of a pain for me too—I ended up splitting my templates into many (!) smaller pieces so I could at least re-use the portions I needed to. Hopefully something "Jinja-esque" comes in time.

There's an (unmaintained) Mustache port and a Mustache-alike in Mandira (https://github.com/jmoiron/mandira) but I've not seen anything like Jinja yet. If there's one thing html/template has going for it is that I can trust it (as much as one can) to be 'safe'.

I wouldn't say web apps in Go should be avoided at all costs, but I would say that you should consider the scope/scale and do a bit of research first. Sometimes Django/Rails or Flask/Sinatra might make it easier on you.

https://github.com/karlseguin/gerb

I didn't get to finish it before leaving on a trip, but I'll be back on it Feb 1st and can hopefully wrap it up in the first week.

I did finish a liquid-inspired template: https://github.com/karlseguin/liquid

but I wasn't particularly happy with it (neither the implementation nor liquid itself).

I don't want to get into a debate about what "inheritance" means, but html/template does support template composition and nested templates, which seem to address the same use case.

> These two problems have made it so I've pretty much given up web apps in Go for now. Services in Go are _amazing_. But if you're trying to get a full blown web app (again, not the point of the linked article above), then you're gonna have a bad time.

I'm sorry to hear that, especially since writing a "full-blown web app" is really not difficult in Go at all, once you know what you're doing.

I've actually been working on Jetpack[0], a sample web application in Go to demonstrate how straightforward this is, once one understands how it actually works. (Disclaimer: it's still a work in progress, so it's not complete/ready yet).

[0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/go-angular-jetpack

Go doesn't offer a clear simple way to do this in their builtin template library. But it turns out, it really is possible to do it, as described in this thread on Stack Exchange[2]. I bookmarked that so that I can boil it down into some simple-to-reuse code if I ever bite the bullet and start using Go for the presentation layer on a major website. What they're doing there is a cool technique, but it's not simple to use out of the box.

1. https://sites.google.com/site/usfcomputerscience/django-temp...

2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11467731/is-it-possible-t...

I understand the point you're making - I just want to point out that Haml is explicitly designed for HTML, whereas html/template more or less "just happens" to be useful for HTML.

As for ERB, I'm not convinced that it is too different in this regard. I'm not much of a Rubyist, and I find it incredibly frustrating to use, but perhaps that's a matter of personal preference.

{text,html}/template have their warts - I literally started Jetpack because of an unusual html/template quirk I ran into that was tricky to debug. However, I don't think it's any worse than other template language in this regard (my main points of reference are Jinja2, ERB, Haml, and Scribble).