I own a freight brokerage that specializes in automation by making our own automation software. The “OS” of a freight brokerage is a Transportation Management System, these share many of the same objects as a CRM and generally are bundled with one. I made our first TMS on top of Salesforce with APEX because I had to spin something up on the fly.
As I prepare for the development of the second version of this TMS+CRM that we will be hosting on-prem, I’ve sampled many languages and open-source software. I’m very impressed by the speed and efficiency of just about everything that is written in Go, yet I haven’t found one CRM or any notable CRUD apps that are using it on the backend.
Having never programmed in Go before, I have to ask, is it feasible to consider creating our TMS+CRM in Go with something as simple as HTMX & “Vanilla” JS on the front end?
I think this is the kind of use case where Go would really shine. I’ve shipped many CRUD apps with Go on the back-end myself. I haven’t used HTMX but Go+HTMX is generally well regarded:
My background is data and reporting. Nowadays they would call me a data engineer/data analyst. Ever so often I would learn a new programming language or new skill as a hobby. Last year was wood working, got expensive, so this year its back to coding. I have done a few small scale CRUD apps in GO. I am wrapping up an app using go, templ, and htmx with sql server as the back end. Sql Server is in a docker container. If I can make a horrible looking htmx front end with GO. You can do a TMS. This caught my attention because my wife has been doing logistics and transportation for years now. When she and I were both working from home and I would here the one-sided conversations dealing with the truckers, ports, and freight brokers. I saw her in a totally different light because she would go from sweet innocent puppy to a full out apex alpha wolf when people weren’t doing their jobs. Anyway my advice is to keep it simple at first and then as you learn more you can get more creative.
Sorry for the late response. The only languages I know are HTML, Visual Basic (lol), C++, Python, and recently built a website with Next.js (but I am trying to stay far away from the complexities of JavaScript). I programmed from 1995-2002 and started again in 2022.
My initial thought was Laravel because it’s batteries-included, and it seems easy enough, but the more I learn about Go, the more I’d like to learn it. I understand it’s not “batteries included”, but it doesn’t seem convoluted and there is a community-supported library for Supabase, which I intend use for Postgres/TimescaleDB.
There are many modules/add-ons that the TMS will need, so I think I’m going to build a simple one with Go, HTMX, & Tailwind. This module, in particular, is to manually check in/out semi-trailers for record keeping.
Regarding you have many DB CRUD operations
Please use Go DB framework - Gorm (https://gorm.io/)
will save you tons of time and make your codes clean and maintenance easily