No API

Many apps today contain data and functionality that is only consumed by the app itself. These apps may consume APIs, but do not offer data or functionality that is useful to other apps. When designing these apps it is tempting to think that the data and functionality in these apps could be useful to other apps in future, but often this turns out not to be true. These apps do not need APIs.

APIs are complex to design and implement correctly. They require a lot of thought about use cases, edge cases, security, and performance under general use. It is a significant effort to design and implement an API for an app if its only consumer is the app's own frontend. Unfortunately Single Page Apps (SPAs) require APIs in order to function, and today we have a proliferation of apps with poorly designed APIs that cater only for their frontends. Furthermore, a significant amount of time and effort goes into synchronizing the frontend and API in these apps, with no real benefit other than to satisfy the SPA framework.

Standalone Apps without APIs

Gofs apps have server-side rendered pages. The pages do not need an API to call the backend functionality, they can call it directly. This eliminates the need to design an API or the need to synchronize frontend code with the API. This eliminates a significant amount of complexity and effort in development.

Gofs apps can also expose API endpoints, for example the app can render JSON just as easily as it renders HTML with templ. We recommend that Gofs frontends still call the backend directly and that any API exposed is carefully designed for general use. If your app is exclusively an API then using vanilla Go may be a better fit than Gofs.