I evaluated Go a few months ago for a web project, but it seemed as if there was a lot of manual work involved in mapping objects in and out of a MySQL database and in and out of JSON (basically, 50% of my day-to-day back end work). It just seemed too arduous.

The second thing that bothered me was that an edge-case bug in one of my HTTP handlers paniced the app. If that had happened in production while under load, many users would have gotten an error due to a bug in one user's request.

So, serious questions:

- What is the best way to map objects to/from JSON? - What is the best way to map objects to/from a database? - What is the best way to prevent a request from crashing the server and killing a bunch of unrelated requests?

I'd recommend using the JSON to generate your struct definitions, in a schema-like fashion. I wrote a tool to automate that process: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson

I use this as a step in the build system for the projects, which ensures that the definitions stay in sync with the API clients/servers themselves.