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Title: Ruby on Rails-like ORM and scaffolding in Golang anyone?
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This is a typical Gopher writing code… on Rails 🚈!I ❤️ Ruby on Rails. With all my 💛. I can rapid-prototype any 3–4 models app in a couple of hours and do a POC in an afternoon, and this is thanks to scaffolding. I can write this and RoR will create a proper Model, Controller, and ~4 Views (MVC) and DB schema with rock-solid change-management :rails generate scaffold Album title:string year:decimal singer:referencerails generate scaffold Track title:string duration:decimal album:referencesrails generate scaffold Article title:string body:string comment:string rating:integer url:string is_public:booleanbundle exec rake db:migrateHowever, my colleagues bully me that🔻Ruby is dead, 🚈 Rails is dead, and long live 📦 Node.Js and so on. So I thought: it’s 🎅 December, let’s learn a new language. I thought of learning C# — just kidding (I’m already a pianist)— I thought that Golang was the way to go. As of December 1st 🎅, everyone on Facebook has a single thing in mind: Whammageddon!After taking a 2h course in Go and doing my first word count, my head got big and I thought: I’m now ready for the next step: a silly Whammageddon app to record my friends whammageddon spectacular stories!Whammageddon rules — if you just woke up from a criogenic coffin yesterday :)🚈 Golang on Rails optionsI tried (meaning, I spent 2 hours each) a few options (Bee, Revel, Buffalo), and I’ll describe them in order. Note that I might be unfair to the first in chronological order as my ability to go get something wasn’t as good as in try number 3 :)Queen Bee might be biased on who wins…1: 🐝 BeegoCode source: https://github.com/beego/beegoBeego was the first Google result for “Ruby on Rails” for go. To be fair to bee, I was on a long flight to Israel and tried to make it work with jumpy airport internet and the experience was horrible (as a true Italian, I thought of filing a PR to enlarge gocapabilities with a new 4-letter verb). Nothing wrong with Bee, though.This is how a migration looks like:Pros 😃:I really enjoyed its ability to simply create ORM model from CLI. Example:$ bee generate scaffold riccardo_post -fields 'title:string,body:text,active:bool,published:datetime'It also allows to have different models connecting to different datasources (wOOt! I wonder how you do a JOIN from Europe to Australia). Example: ```bee generate scaffold user -fields="first_name:string:255,last_name:string:255,email:string:255" -driver=postgres -conn="postgres://user:pass@localhost:5432/db?sslmode=disable"bee generate scaffold riccpost -fields="title:string,body:text" -driver=mysql -conn="root:@tcp(127.0.0.1:3306)/test"CLI allows to create docs and swagger interface on the fly via bee run -downdoc=true -gendoc=true .I ~supports 80% scaffolding for model, controllers, DB/migration but creates an empty view (github issue). In my case, it gets the controller dependencies wrong (probably because its a monorepo) and I need to manually fix it ( long path to beego-whammageddon/models). 😫It politely asks me if I want to create model, controller, resource, migration and migrate the DB itself! Wow!bee dockerize creates a Dockerfile for you. I’ve always wished for the same on RoR!Cons 😢 :Lack of Scaffolding capabilities on the view side. It rocks on model/migration, but it doesn’t create the needed views.Scaffolding on Controller side seems broken to me. I get Method Not Allowed, which is answered here (missing Get()function — why would you do that?!?)2. 🥳 RevelSource: https://revel.github.io/When I read from Amrit: “ If you have used Ruby on Rails, you are going to love Revel. If you are a Python developer who has used Django, you will like Beego.” I felt: what have I done in the past 4 hours?!? I had an agnition, or shall I say… a revelation!!Revel has a very simple and straightforward docs page which will guide you through a multi-page, stateless form-rich hello world within 10 minutes.It has modules (pluggable packages) for NewRelic, Static files, Logging, ..It has nice examples repos; the closest to Ror seems to be the Booking app (docs — code). Code is from 2020.It uses GORP as ORM. However, after first excitement, I realized also Revel lacks a proper way to scaffoldI was too stupid to make it work and I threw the sponge. Hoewver with 2 lines you can actually get this — wow!Commands to achieve this (copied from here):git clone https://github.com/revel/examples.git "${GOPATH}/src/github.com/revel/examples"#DOESNT WORK FOR ME - I might be stuipidrevel run github.com/revel/examples/booking# THIS WORKS FOR MErevel run "${GOPATH}/src/github.com/revel/examples"So if you have time to understand and reverse engineer the booking app, you’re going to enjoy Revel a lot. However, the inability to scaffold from scratch is a real turn off for me.Here I totally failed to do any scaffolding: no model/controller/view for me. I’ll probably spend some time in the weekend reverse-engineering the booking app… 😢3. 🦬Buffalosource: https://gobuffalo.io/Now, the first thing you see with Buffalo is — wOOt? They even bothered adding a CSS! Clearly, there’s some money and a real company behind this (like DHH and Basecamp behind Rails). Graphics is captivating and I love it already!First, it uses pop which supports PostgreS Cockroach MySQL and Sqlite3 out of the box.With Soda and Fizz, you get a Rails-like experience in setting up the DB and migrating it:// migrate UPcreate_table("users") {  t.Column("email", "string", {})  t.Column("twitter_handle", "string", {"size": 50})  t.Column("age", "integer", {"default": 0})  t.Column("admin", "bool", {"default": false})  t.Column("company_id", "uuid", {"default_raw": "uuid_generate_v1()"})  t.Column("bio", "text", {"null": true})  t.Column("joined_at", "timestamp", {})}// migrate downdrop_table("users")This is absolutely fantastic ! Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have the CLI interface to create a scaffold 😐, while you can reach a great experience by typing the code yourself.To use generators, it looks to me you need to install pop as a separate module: https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo-pop. After doing so, you get buffalo pop g --help which returns this same output. (Before, it would return a weird output).Now, I was able with a single command line (non documented anywhere, just by trying out!) to create a new model with my fields and also its migration, but not the controller and the views :/# For '--skip-migration' read belowbuffalo pop g model --skip-migration foobar RiccTitle:string RiccDescription:textbuffalo pop g model --skip-migration barbaz RiccDescription:text UltimateAnswer:int32 Active:boolNote: he first time you call the function without skip miogration, but every subsequent invocation it will create another migration for the same model; so if you just want to auto-magically update the model until you got it right, you call it as above.Like in Rails, DB can be easily configured in a single YAML or via ENV variables.# database.yamldevelopment:  dialect: postgres  database: whamageddon_buffalo_development  user: postgres  password: postgres  host: 127.0.0.1  pool: 5test:  url: {{envOr "TEST_DATABASE_URL" "postgres://postgres:postgres@127.0.0.1:5432/whamageddon_buffalo_test?sslmode=disable"}}production:  url: {{envOr "DATABASE_URL" "postgres://postgres:postgres@127.0.0.1:5432/whamageddon_buffalo_production?sslmode=disable"}}[Golang vs Ruby] on ORM and ScaffoldingSo my first impressions on Go (vs Ruby):➕blazing fast➕compile in a single binary — easy to dockerize/ship.➖ Go has a tendency to want your app to be single repo. What if I want to have 3 folders under the same repo — can I Mr Go?No thanks Mr Go :)➖ Lack of a convincing zero-brain scaffolding technique.ConclusionsLike Bonucci told the Brits at the end of European Championship in London, “ne dovete mangiare di pastasciutta!” (you still have a lot of pasta to eat), I believe Golang has still a long way to go to get to Ruby feasts when it comes to ORM and Rails rapid-prototyping.Bonucci is a recognized national hero in Italy after this. Expect rolling the arm gesture to catch up with emojipedia starting v14.0!This morning, while swimming, I wanted to create a nice table with 3–5 stars for all, but Medium doesn’t support tables. Hence I’ll just get the winner per topic:Documentation: revel & buffaloLook and feel: BuffaloDocumentation for day-0 hello app: revel.Model CLI creation: beego.Migration: Buffalo (thanks to fizz)Scaffolding: none (rails rulez).However, go has a long list of advantages that makes this passage worthwhile:damn easy dockerization (single chubby binary)no dependencies craze in prod (single chubby binary)Note there are also other solution apart from Bee, Revel and Buffalo: Gin&Gonic, Goji, Iris, … and I hear echo also strikes a great balance (think of Sinatra if you’re a rubyist).Note. I’m a ~day1 user of Go. I’m pretty sure some things I’ve said might be incorrect. I’d be honoured to get your feedback in form of comments.
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Author: Riccardo Carlesso
PublishedDate: 2022-12-22
Category: Blogs
NewsPaper: Riccardo Carlesso - Medium