Wednesday 5 December 2012

Starting with Go

Recently I have been experimenting with Go (or "golang" for search engines), a programming language from Google. My ultimate aim is to create web applications on Google Web App, and I had been planning on doing that in Ruby (my corresponding Ruby blog is here), using Rails 3, but Ruby support seems to have faltered with no updates in over a year.

The Go language is based here:
http://golang.org/

Go is a compiled language that looks to have been designed for simplicity (in the sense of a reduced set of keywords and constructs). It is not object-orientated; last time I used a language that was not object-orientated it was QBASIC about 15 years ago...

Some other links:
http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html
http://golangtutorials.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/table-of-contents.html

A simple but good IDE can be found here:
http://code.google.com/p/liteide/

Go has no framework analogous to Rails, but it does have some nice features built in, and there is a very simple tutorial to get a guest book project (similar to the classic Ruby on Rails tutorial) up and running.

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/go/gettingstarted/introduction

In some regards, the tutorial is better than the Ruby on Rails equivalents as it includes a system for users to log in before posting (which is trivial in Google App  Engine), and it ends with a fully uploaded and operational application (again, uploading is very easy on Google App Engine).

However, the next steps are not so clear, hence, I am "struggling with go".

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