Babel and Go

An initial version of Babel for Go supports server-side development. Some caveats:

• decimal and int64 do not serialize correctly yet. They are supposed to have quotes. The Go serializer doesn't do this correctly for pointer types.
• datetime serializes with nanoseconds (too many digits). For example, "2006-01-02T15:04:05.999999999Z07:00". Perhaps we should support this because it's super accurate.
• enum is supported but shows up in the data structure as a string. There are handy functions generated to make between the string values and constants representing the enum values.
• decimal is not yet supported. I thought it would map nicely to big.Rat, but that doesn't seem to the same type.
• No client is generated yet.
• There isn't library infrastructure to support anything other than JSON. This is partly due to being able to support Go's jsonrpc package.
• The code doesn't yet figure out which imports are needed. Go doesn't allow extra imports, so when using multiple Babel files or includes you are likely to run into issues.
• Code is plaed into folders based on the namespace. It's recommended to pass -output $GOPATH/src on the command line. Thus, a namespace of github.com/me/Foo would end up with files in $GOPATH/src/github.com/me/foo.
• Biggest caveat: not much testing has been done yet.

Babel for Go generates a class that can be used with a Babel server or with Go's built-in jsonrpc package.

Sample Application

See the demo application or JSON-RPC sample application for more details. The sample includes a jsonrpc client (see babjc.go) and a server that supports both Babel HTTP and jsonrpc (see babjs.go). It also serves the test harness.

Steps to get started

• You'll need to rebuild Babel using build.sh
• Until a time issue is fixed, you'll need to edit babel/errorModel.go and uncomment the "time" import.
• Go to babel and run go install.

Interesting Notes

• I will probably code it up to call go fmt at some point.
• I was surprised how several types just serialized right out of the box. Byte arrays ([]byte) drop right into the base64 format we use. Times are obvious (although have too much precision per our spec).
• In Go it's a pain to have everything generated as a pointer so that it can be nullable. It certainly makes it consistent with Babel's philosophy, but the code is yuckier.

Have fun.