From Laravel to Sponge: How to Easily Develop Web Services with Golang
Published: 2024-01-07 12:00:12

If you're a PHP developer, you should be familiar with Laravel, one of the most popular web development frameworks in PHP. It provides powerful features and flexibility, helping developers quickly build high-quality web applications. When you shift your focus to the Go language, you might be looking for an equally simple and efficient way to develop web services, and **sponge** is one of the recommended tools.

You might be concerned that developing web services in Go might be less efficient than in PHP. However, there's no need to worry. The syntax of the Go language is simple and easy to grasp. Moreover, Go has many powerful tools to assist you in rapidly developing web services, with sponge being a highly recommended tool. It allows you to develop web applications as easily as with Laravel.

### Why Choose Sponge?

- **Ease of Use:** Sponge employs a modular design with a user-friendly UI for code generation, making operations simple and enabling the construction of complex web applications with ease.
  
- **Powerful Features:** Sponge offers a rich set of out-of-the-box features, including logging, ORM, authentication, validation, caching, messaging, tracing, monitoring, configuration management, CI/CD, automatic API documentation, distributed transactions, and more.
  
- **Excellent Performance:** Sponge is built on the [gin](https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin) framework, providing outstanding performance for web service development.

### Getting Started with Sponge

#### Install Sponge

Sponge can be installed on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Check the [installation instructions](https://github.com/zhufuyi/sponge/blob/main/assets/install-cn.md) for details.

#### Start the UI Service

After installation, start the Sponge UI service:

```bash
sponge run
```

Access `http://localhost:24631` in your local browser to operate the UI and generate code, as shown in the following image:


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/jfrh7evera1l2584uffy.png)

> If you want to access the UI from a browser on a different host, specify the host IP or domain when starting the UI, e.g., `sponge run -a http://your-host-ip:24631`. Alternatively, you can start the UI service in Docker to support cross-host access; refer to the [instructions for Docker](https://github.com/zhufuyi/sponge/blob/main/assets/install-cn.md#Docker%E7%8E%AF%E5%A2%83).

### Project Example

- Example source code: [https://github.com/zhufuyi/sponge_examples/tree/main/1_web-gin-CRUD](https://github.com/zhufuyi/sponge_examples/tree/main/1_web-gin-CRUD)

### Sponge Development Documentation

For detailed steps, configuration, and deployment instructions using Sponge, refer to the [Sponge Development Documentation](https://go-sponge.com/zh-cn/).

### Summaries

Sponge is an incredibly user-friendly development tool that enables you to quickly and effortlessly develop web services in Go, enjoying the high performance and concurrency advantages of the Go language. If you're considering developing web services in Go, sponge is a highly worthwhile choice. Making the transition from the world of Laravel to Go, sponge becomes your capable assistant, making web development a breeze.

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GitHub Repository: [https://github.com/zhufuyi/sponge](https://github.com/zhufuyi/sponge)