Implementing caching in Go

Caching data in a web application is sometimes necessary to avoid requesting static data from a database or external service again and again. Go does not provide any built-in package to cache responses, but it does support it through external packages.

There are a number of packages, such as https://github.com/coocood/freecache and https://github.com/patrickmn/go-cache, which can help in implementing caching and, in this recipe, we will be using the https://github.com/patrickmn/go-cache to implement it.

How to do it…

1. Install the github.com/patrickmn/go-cache package using the go get command, as follows:

$ go get github.com/patrickmn/go-cache

2. Create http-caching.go, where we will create a cache and populate it with data on server boot up, as follows:

package main
import 
(
  "fmt"
  "log"
  "net/http"
  "time"
  "github.com/patrickmn/go-cache"
)
const 
(
  CONN_HOST = "localhost"
  CONN_PORT = "8080"
)
var newCache *cache.Cache
func init() 
{
  newCache = cache.New(5...