Introduction

Bud is a fullstack web framework for Go.

Mission

Bud’s mission is to reduce the cost of building, launching and maintaining ambitious web applications.

We reduce this cost by providing a stable, productive development environment with a cohesive, documented and well-tested set of building blocks that every serious website needs.

Your sponsorship will help Bud accomplish this mission faster.

History

I started working on Bud 2 years ago after seeing how productive people could be in Laravel. I wanted the same for Go, so I decided to try creating Laravel for the Go ecosystem. However, my first version after 6 months needed to scaffold many files just to get started. If you are coming from Rails or Laravel, you may shrug and consider this as pretty normal.

Unfortunately, I have been spoiled by the renaissance in frontend frameworks like Next.js that start barebones but every file you add incrementally enhances your web application. This keeps the initial complexity under control.

With this additional inspiration, I worked on the next iteration for the ensuing 18 months.

The goals are now:

• Generate files only as you need them. Keep these generated files away from your application code and give developers the choice to keep them out of source control. You shouldn't need to care about the generated code. You may be surprised to learn that Go also generates code to turn your Go code into an executable, but it works so well you don't need to think about it. Bud should feel like this.

• Feel like using a modern JS framework. This means it should work with multiple modern frontend frameworks like Svelte and React, support live reload, and have server-side rendering for better performance and SEO.

• The framework should be extensible from Day 1. Bud is too ambitious for one person. We're going to need an ambitious community behind this framework. Extensibility should be primarily driven by adding code, rather than by adding configuration.

• Bud should provide high-level, type-safe APIs for developers while generating performant, low-level Go code under the covers.

• Bud should compile to a single binary that contains your entire web app and can be copied to a server that doesn't even have Go installed.