Sometimes, you want to build a service with a basic web interface that deals with dynamic data, but you don't want to have to deal with building a full API and spin up a SPA with some heavy framework, etc. Instead, you'd rather just build pages using Go templates and easily feed them data from a backing repository in a type-safe manner.
Enter Gonsen!
Gonsen is a simple templating system that lets you write HTML pages using Go templates, and serve them with type safety using generics. It's just a simple wrapper around Go's existing templating system.
Gonsen works with either a file system on disk or using the embed package.
Using embed is highly recommended with Gonsen as it will bundle the entire
site into the compiled binary, making your service easily portable.
Gonsen is not a full routing framework. It is intended to be used with something like Gorilla Mux or other routing frameworks that already exist.
For a code example to follow, see the basic example.
Gonsen is intended to be used with the embed standard package. You supply a
basic skeletal structure of what your pages should look like, and then each page
can be defined as simpler components similar to something like Vue.
The skeletal structure can include any number of subcomponents. The basic example includes subcomponents for style, scripts, and the main HTML body, but you could add other subcomponents for a more dynamic menu, etc.
The given filesystem must be in the following structure:
site
|-> pages/
| |-> page1.html
| |-> another.html
|-> base.html
The base.html file is used as the base template, and all files found in
pages will use base.html. Any other directories are ignored by Gonsen, but
it can be useful to include static assets and such in other directories as the
example shows.
make will run the basic example.
This is really just a simple wrapper for now, and it's almost more a proof of concept than a proper library. Is there room for it to grow into something more? Let me know in the Discussions tab if you have any thoughts!