v4 Discussion

[System-Glitch]

v3.11.0 is expected to be the last minor release before v4, unless critical issues have to be addressed while developing this new major version.

v4 will contain a number of breaking changes. To avoid moving to a new major version too often, required breaking changes are pushed back as much as possible and grouped into a single release.

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of changes planned for v4:

• Validation
  • Validation rules composition #158 : this change would be handy to avoid redundancy and improve re-usability.
  • Validating arrays of objects #155 : this change requires a lot of internal modifications to how the body is validated and will be facilitated by the next point in this list. Libraries or tools parsing validation rules will have to be rewritten. Rule sets validating arrays and n-dimensional arrays will have slight changes and a cleaner, more readable syntax.
  • Add request context to validation #136 : will require all custom validation rules to be rewritten.
  • New tree-like structure for validation error instead of flat map.
• Logging not working when no route matched #127 : this issue in particular would need more thought. The logging modules would need to be more than a just a middleware, and maybe be an integral part of routers, like CORS.
• Migrate from dgrijalva/jwt-go to golang-jwt/jwt #154 : this breaking change would be minor, only the import path would change.
• JWT: Use claim "sub" instead of "userid" by default, to match the standard.
• Change Go version support policy and only support the last two versions. (Go 1.15 and 1.16 at the time of writing, but by the time v4 is ready, I think 1.17 will be out, which would let us use 1.16 new features such as io/fs.
• Somehow use io/fs more globally. The filesystem package could benefit from it, as well as the static file serving feature. Needs more thought as well.
• helper package and sub-package refactoring and renaming. Maybe splitting this package in multiple smaller and more focused packages (such as slice for example, for all slice helper functions)

Although work on v4 has already started (on the validation part), I'd like to discuss these changes with the community. Please let me know what you think, and feel free to suggest changes as well.

As always, you can track my progress in the Projects section.