Remix Jokes - Go Edition

Remix is a React framework for building web applications. I used my momentum after learning Remix by building Thankful to rebuild their Jokes app in Go.

In summary, the application is a trivial CRUD app that allows authenticated users to browse and add jokes.

From the Go side, I was pleased by the typing system and how the compiler was helping me explore the language and assisting me towards having a functional code!

Project Structure

The following is the folder structure for the project.

.
├── html
│   ├── auth.go.html
│   ├── index.go.html
│   ├── jokes
│   │   ├── index.go.html
│   │   ├── joke.go.html
│   │   └── new.go.html
│   └── layouts
│       ├── jokes.go.html
│       ├── nav.go.html
│       └── root.go.html
├── lib
│   ├── db
│   │   └── db.go
│   ├── handlers
│   │   ├── auth.go
│   │   ├── handlers.go
│   │   ├── index.go
│   │   └── jokes.go
│   ├── models
│   │   ├── joke.go
│   │   └── user.go
│   └── utils
├── main.go
└── readme.md

Moreover, this project has 4 different packages:

• The handlers package is responsible for all the HTTP side.
• The models package is responsible for modeling the domain.
• The utils package is responsible for all the helpers needed.
• The db package is responsible for all stuff related to the DB.

I must say that this is not a best practice. I am not even sure about this organization. However, this feels ok now.

What I Learned

Learning a new language by building a web CRUD application may seem dull. However, having simple requirements in a controlled scope is powerful to focus on what's more important - learning the language!

Rebuilding the Remix Jokes app in Go allowed me to explore the rich standard library. Moreover, I have a better understanding of packages VS folders VS files. Finally, I got to experience how to integrate 3rd party libraries into my application.

To build a simple CRUD web application, you need an HTTP server, a way to serve some HTML files dynamically, and a mechanism to persist and manipulate your data.

The net/http Standard Package

The net/http standard package helps in serving web requests.

http.HandleFunc("/", Index)
http.ListenAndServe(":3000", nil)

The above snippet enables serving web requests on port 3000 on the / path by executing the Index handler.

The html/template Standard Package

The html/template package helps serve HTML templates with dynamic data and reusable layout.

	t, _ := template.ParseFiles(files...)
	t.Execute(w, d)

The above snippet enables parsing any number of go.html files and allows for the {{}} syntax to have dynamic HTML.

The Gorm ORM

Although the Go standard library supports working with SQL DBs using database/sql, I decided to go with Gorm as the ORM in this CRUD application. The reason is to get a taste of using (install, read the docs, and utilize) external libraries.

type User struct {
	gorm.Model
	Username     string
	PasswordHash string
	Jokes        []Joke
}

The above snippet helps create the user model, which reflects the users table with a one-to-many relationship.