Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

Understanding httprouter – a lightweight HTTP router

httprouter, as the name suggests, routes the HTTP requests to particular handlers. httprouter is a well-known package in Go for creating simple routers with an elegant API. The developers coming from the Python/Django community are very familiar with a full-blown URL dispatcher in the Django framework. httprouter provides similar features:

• Allows variables in the route paths
• Matches the REST methods (GET, POST, PUT, and so on)
• No compromise of performance

We are going to discuss these qualities in more detail in the following section. Before that, there are a few noteworthy points that make httprouter an even better URL router:

• httprouter plays well with the in-built http.Handler