Golang-Beego Framework and its Applications

There are usually some concerns when implementing a new technology such as what would happen if we get stuck somewhere and end up wasting our time and effort. It’s possible that we’ll have to go back to the original solution. We faced similar issues a year ago but after long and in-depth research, we found a solution that was more secure and safe-Golang and its frameworks. The way it is documented is really helpful. However, we were quite certain that we would not find all the answers online which was a challenge we accepted in the spirit of Lailah Gifty Akita’s renowned adage, “THERE IS ALWAYS A SOLUTION TO EVERY CHALLENGING SITUATION.”

This blog mainly talks about Golang-Beego framework and its applications. We’ll be discussing how Golang is used in Web Development and why most of the developers shift from Python, Node, or other languages to Go.

Let’s understand the Golang framework in order to know how it works.

What is Golang?

First appearing in 2009, Golang (popularly known as Go) quickly gained popularity among developers, becoming a preferred language for more than 90% of users. Its ancestor languages are C and C++ programming languages which is quite evident by looking into its syntax and compiling features. 

Primarily used for backend development, Go has 4 other use cases- 

1. Cloud & Network Services
2. Command-line Interfaces (CLIs) 
3. Web Development
4. Development Operations & Site Reliability Engineering. 

Here are some of the main features of Golang that make this framework the preferred choice for developers:

1. Simplicity 

Go syntax is straightforward as shown here and its compiler can smell trouble and raise errors during the build process — that is before the program is run.

The flexibility, usability, and incredibly cool concept behind Go (how it handles native concurrency, garbage collection, and safety+speed) are some of the features that are quite useful for developers.

2. Speed

Built-in concurrency ( Goroutines and Channels ) is one of the main reasons for its high performance. Analyzing this stack overflow will allow us to estimate its speed.

“I may have implemented this incorrectly because the results do not make sense. I have a Go program that counts to 1000000000; it finishes in less than a second. On the other hand, I have a Python script; it finishes in a few minutes. Why is the Go version so much faster? Are they both counting up to 1000000000 or am I missing something?” 

If you’re still unsure about the speed, here’s a comparison between Go, Node JS, Java, and Python that will help in gaining more clarity about its usage:

My Device Specification:

Device name- LAPTOP-Q8U9LM8P

Processor- Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10210U CPU @ 1.60GHz   2.10 GHz

Installed RAM- 16.0 GB (15.6 GB usable)

System type- 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

N-body print:

Source Time To Count 

Go: 6.34   seconds

Python3: 545.25 seconds

GO

Output:

Factorial   Time To calculate factorial

10000       0.008 seconds

50000       0.506 seconds

100000      3.154 seconds

500000      82.394 seconds

1000000     284.445 seconds

NodeJS (Javascript )

Output:

Factorial   Time To calculate factorial

10000       0.113 seconds

50000       1.974 seconds

100000      22.730 seconds

500000      477.534 seconds 

1000000     1175.795 seconds 

Python

Output:

Factorial   Time To calculate factorial

10000       0.046 seconds

50000       1.187 seconds

100000      6.051 seconds

500000      388.607 seconds 

1000000     813.725 seconds 

JAVA

Output:

Factorial   Time To calculate factorial

10000       0.064 seconds

50000       1.607 seconds

100000      5.363 seconds

500000     141.076 seconds

1000000     585.868 seconds

3. Safety:

GARBAGE Collector:

Go prefers to allocate memory on the stack, so most memory allocations will end up there. This means that it has a stack per goroutine and when possible it will assign variables to this stack.

Golang mark and sweep garbage collector has two phases: Mark, and Sweep. First, it will mark all unused and used variables, then sweep unused ones.

The statistics and the description above suggest why one should work with Go. Golang framework that is best for creating APIs also accelerates and facilitates development.

Why do we use Beego Framework?

Be it Go or Beego, both are fantastic for developing high-performance REST APIs. 

Beego is a “battery included” framework, with built-in tools ( bee tool ), ORM, and libraries compared with other frameworks like Gin-gonic which is not a “battery included” type and contains most essential libraries and features not good for server-side features.

Beego uses a typical Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework which has turned out to be good for people (like us) who work on Python-Django before and Beego is quite similar.

Conclusion: 

That’s how we started our application with Golang and Beego. We worked on PDF, Image handling with ImageMagick, AWS-SNS, AWS-SES SMTP, IVR calls, Fax, Digital signatures, Reports generation with ORM, and many more. And we haven’t found any blockage while working with third-party features like Twilio or AWS. It is really simple to write code on Golang as mentioned by their creators. There are certain challenges in using this framework but there are solutions as well. We really enjoyed it working on this framework. BEST OF LUCK for your upcoming Golang applications.

About the Author

Piyush Raj graduated from IIT Kharagpur in Chemical Dept. He started his career with ML and AI, and now works at Mantra Labs as a software developer. In his free time, he likes to explore new paths in the real world or on paper through traveling and painting.