Book Image

Building RESTful Web services with Go

By : Naren Yellavula
Book Image

Building RESTful Web services with Go

By: Naren Yellavula

Overview of this book

REST is an architectural style that tackles the challenges of building scalable web services and in today's connected world, APIs have taken a central role on the web. APIs provide the fabric through which systems interact, and REST has become synonymous with APIs. The depth, breadth, and ease of use of Go, makes it a breeze for developers to work with it to build robust Web APIs. This book takes you through the design of RESTful web services and leverages a framework like Gin to implement these services. The book starts with a brief introduction to REST API development and how it transformed the modern web. You will learn how to handle routing and authentication of web services along with working with middleware for internal service. The book explains how to use Go frameworks to build RESTful web services and work with MongoDB to create REST API. You will learn how to integrate Postgres SQL and JSON with a Go web service and build a client library in Go for consuming REST API. You will learn how to scale APIs using the microservice architecture and deploy the REST APIs using Nginx as a proxy server. Finally you will learn how to metricize a REST API using an API Gateway. By the end of the book you will be proficient in building RESTful APIs in Go.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Why is an API gateway required?


Suppose a company named XYZ developed the API for its internal purpose. There are two ways in which it exposes that API for external use:

  • Exposes it using authentication from known clients
  • Exposes it as an API as a service

In the first case, this API is consumed by the other services inside the company. Since they are internal, we don't restrict the access. But in the second case, since API details are given to the outside world, we need a broker in between to check and validate the requests. This broker is the API gateway. An API gateway is a broker that sits in between the client and the server and forwards the request to the server on passing specific conditions.

Now, XYZ has an API written in Go and also in Java. There are a few common things that apply to any API:

  • Authentication
  • Logging of requests and responses

Without an API gateway, we need to write another server that tracks things such as requests and authentication of the API. It is hectic to implement...