Using the render package

If you want rendering JSON and HTML to be even simpler, there is the github.com/unrolled/render package. This package was inspired by the martini-contrib/render package and is my goto when it comes to rendering data for presentation in my web applications.

package main

import (
    "net/http"

    "gopkg.in/unrolled/render.v1"
)

func main() {
    r := render.New()
    mux := http.NewServeMux()

    mux.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
        w.Write([]byte("Welcome, visit sub pages now."))
    })

    mux.HandleFunc("/data", func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
        r.Data(w, http.StatusOK, []byte("Some binary data here."))
    })

    mux.HandleFunc("/json", func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
        r.JSON(w, http.StatusOK, map[string]string{"hello": "json"})
    })

    mux.HandleFunc("/html", func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
        // Assumes you have a template in ./templates called "example.tmpl"
        // $ mkdir -p templates && echo "<h1>Hello {{.}}.</h1>" > templates/example.tmpl
        r.HTML(w, http.StatusOK, "example", nil)
    })

    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", mux)
}

Exercises

1. Have fun playing with all of the options available when calling render.New()
2. Try using the .yield helper function (with the curly braces) and a layout with HTML templates.