Go has become very popular for web development, particularly for high-performance REST APIs. Recently, Gin has become a well-known Go framework for REST APIs. Throughout guide, we'll concentrate on the development of a web application with Gin. We'll start with a brief introduction.

Go

Go, (also known as Golang) is a statically typed, compiled programming language. Go is characterized by its simplicity, efficiency, and focus on concurrency.

Here are some key features and aspects of Go:

• Simplicity: Go was designed to be straightforward and convenient to learn. Its syntax is clean and minimalistic, making it approachable for both new and experienced programmers.
• Concurrency: Go has built-in support for concurrency through goroutines and channels.
• Efficiency: Go compiles to machine code, resulting in high-performance executable files.
• Static Typing: Go is statically typed, meaning that variable types are checked at compile time.
• Standard Library: Go comes with a rich standard library that provides support for various tasks such as networking, encryption, HTTP servers, and more. This eliminates the need for third-party libraries for many common tasks.
• Cross-Platform: Go is designed to be portable and runs on multiple platforms.

Overall, Go is a versatile language suitable for a wide range of applications, from web development to system programming, cloud services, and more. Its simplicity, efficiency, and built-in concurrency support makes it an attractive choice for many developers and organizations.

Gin

Gin is a popular web framework for the Go (Golang) programming language. It is lightweight, fast, and feature-rich, making it a preferred choice for building web applications and APIs in Go.

According to the official documentation, these are the common features of Gin that make it stand out.

• Fast - Radix tree-based routing, small memory footprint. No reflection. Predictable API performance.
• Middleware support - An incoming HTTP request can be handled by a chain of middlewares and the final action. For example, Logger, Authorization, GZIP and finally post a message in the DB.
• Crash-free - Gin can catch a panic occurred during an HTTP request and recover it. This way, your server will always be available. As an example - it’s also possible to report this panic to Sentry!
• JSON validation - Gin can parse and validate the JSON of a request—for example, checking the existence of required values.
• Organizing routes - Enhance the structure of your routes. Group them according to authorization requirements, API versions, and more. Moreover, nesting groups is possible without compromising performance, allowing for unlimited flexibility.
• Error management - Gin provides a convenient way to collect all the errors occurred during an HTTP request. Eventually, a middleware can write them to a log file, to a database and send them through the network.
• Rendering built-in - Gin provides an easy-to-use API for JSON, XML and HTML rendering.
• Extendable - Creating new middleware is so easy.