Where are you using gomponents?

[markuswustenberg]

I'd love to hear some stories. 😊

Where are you using gomponents? Show off your personal project or describe your work project.

Where does it shine?

[mikestefanello]

Hey @markuswustenberg - Big thanks for creating this wonderful library. It took me a while to come around to this approach over standard templates, but it's really grown on me and I enjoy using it. I recently made a huge change to Pagoda to port it from Go templates to Gomponents. I outline how everything is built and structured here (and here is the code). Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas to handle things better.

Where does it shine?

In a lot of places, but for my example, I think the form element gomponents shine the most since it provides inline validation markup without having to do anything extra.

[markuswustenberg]

Hey @mikestefanello, thank you for the kind words! I'm very happy that you saw the advantages of gomponents. Reading the part from the readme, you seem to have hit exactly the same pain points I did before writing the library myself. :D

You seem to have a mix of declarative and imperative style of building UI components. An example of the imperative style is constructing a group and appending to it (https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda/blob/main/pkg/ui/pages/home.go#L21). I'm definitely not saying it's wrong (!), but I'm curious why you're doing it that way, instead of sticking to declarative (using capital letter If)?

[mikestefanello]

There's a few reasons:

1. In some cases, like the one you linked to, what you intend to render under certain conditions is not currently available. In this particular case, r.AuthUser might be nil on any given request, if the user is not logged in. If I use If(), the code still executes even if the condition is false, and thus would panic in this case. This sort of relates to my next point, but perhaps If() could be modified, or another helper provided, that only executes if the condition is true.

2. Since the code still executes even if the If() condition is false, it felt wasteful, at times, to use it, rather than just using a standard if. I do use it for more trivial cases, but aside from the nil case above, there's a slight waste of performance to execute all of those functions, build slices, allocate strings, etc, to ultimately do nothing. I know for 99.9% of applications, especially anything using a starter kit like Pagoda, this will be completely trivial and negligible, but sometimes I can't help myself. I'm used to dealing with services that handle >1B requests a day, so I'm always thinking about optimizations. In case you missed it in the readme, I also included a mostly unnecessary, though slightly clever, Node cache to better handle static content (https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda/blob/main/pkg/ui/cache/cache.go). It not only caches a given Node in memory, but also fully renders it and converts it to a Raw before caching it so it does not have to be re-rendered on every single request. Again, unnecessary and trivial, but it did provide quite a nice improvement in basic benchmarks for the large, static parts of my layouts.

3. The switch to gomponents was huge and recent and I haven't yet did the usual thing where I continually go over everything I write, looking for ways to clean it up, better organize everything, etc. What's in this ui dir was put together pretty fast and I was still mostly new to gomponents at that time.

[markuswustenberg]

1. Have a look at Iff instead for those use cases. I think it does exactly what you need.
2. Ah, cool! Yeah, makes perfect sense. I usually handle my caching in a different layer, but if you need caching of static partials, that's a neat optimization (when needed).
3. Ah, right, thank you for the context. Makes sense! Code has to bake for a certain amount of time to become really good. :D

And if you have any questions about gomponents going forward, always feel free to reach out, here or elsewhere. 😊

[mikestefanello]

Oh, I completely missed Iff()! Thanks for the suggestion. I'll definitely start using that.