currently, i roll my own: golang net/http, gorilla/mux, eknkc/amber, and database/sql. i'm not entirely happy with amber as an html template language, prefer jade or haml, but it seems to work so far, i've had a few problems with it and the author fixed one of them in terms of nested data structures, but there's another issue pending for a long time so i don't think he has the interest to maintain this.<p>got into expressjs/jade, but didn't like the nested async callbacks, really annoying to read the code, but the tooling side was cool with npm, gulp, etc.<p>i used to use sinatra/haml/activerecord for a long time, really liked the simplicity of it, but ruby in general was just too slow in terms of performance, had to use a lot of physical resources to supplement for its slowness.<p>before sinatra i used ror, this was before i decided that rolling my own was more streamlined and efficient.<p>before ror i used python, tornado, and sqlalchemy. god, sqlalchemy was so clumsy back then, i even bought their ebook for my kindle, what a waste of money. ran ok, really liked the decorators used by tornado, but then fb went and bought friendfeed which doomed tornado to the depths of /dev/null.<p>before python, i used java servlets (as part of the j2ee standard) and java server pages. it was sort of nice to use html files and embed these java snippets, but still pretty primitive.<p>before j2ee, i used php, pear, god save me from those days. my personal blog was built on this, i saved all entries into xml documents and stored them in directories based on the date. that site was hacked and pwned so badly, thanks php security holes! this was a time before templates and orms.<p>and from the very beginning, there was pure html, wow, we have evolved so much since then.<p>golang is perfect for me, but i use it for a lot more than just a dynamic web server, it's also an api server and websocket service. i really like the ease of deployments with golang i.e. just copy a binary to my production servers. and the code is fast and scales. coming from sqlalchemy, activerecord, and sequel, i was a bit underwhelmed by gorp, but soon found out that going with sql was good enough.