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

JSON RPC using Gorilla RPC


We saw that the Gorilla toolkit helps us by providing many useful libraries. Then we explored Mux, Handlers, and now, the Gorilla RPC library. Using this, we can create RPC servers and clients that talk using a JSON instead of a custom reply pointer. Let us convert the preceding example into a much more useful one.

Consider this scenario. We have a JSON file on the server that has details of books (name, ID, author). The client requests book information by making an HTTP request. When the RPC server receives the request, it reads the file from the filesystem and parses it. If the given ID matches any book, then the server sends the information back to the client in the JSON format. We can install Gorilla RPC with the following command:

go get github.com/gorilla/rpc

This package derives from the standard net/rpc package but uses a single HTTP request per call instead of persistent connections. Other differences compared to net/rpc: are explained in the following sections...