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.

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Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Title Page
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Customer Feedback
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with REST API Development
Getting Started with REST API Development
Types of web services
REST verbs and status codes
Rise of REST API with Single Page Applications
Setting up the project and running the development server
Building our first service – finding the Roman numeral
Using Gulp for creating auto code compiling and server reloading
Summary
2
Handling Routing for Our REST Services
Handling Routing for Our REST Services
Getting the code
Understanding Go's net/http package
ServeMux, a basic router in Go
Introducing httprouter, a lightweight HTTP router
Introducing Gorilla Mux, a powerful HTTP router
Creating a basic API layout for URL shortening services
Summary 
3
Working with Middleware and RPC
Working with Middleware and RPC
Getting the code
What is middleware? 
Multiple middleware and chaining
Painless middleware chaining with Alice
Using Gorilla's Handlers middleware for Logging 
What is RPC?
JSON RPC using Gorilla RPC
Summary
4
Simplifying RESTful Services with Popular Go Frameworks
Simplifying RESTful Services with Popular Go Frameworks
Getting the code
go-restful, a framework for REST API creation
CRUD operations and SQLite3 basics
Building a Metro Rail API with go-restful
Building RESTful APIs with the Gin framework
Building a RESTful API with Revel.go
Summary 
5
Working with MongoDB and Go to Create REST APIs
Working with MongoDB and Go to Create REST APIs
Getting the code
Introduction to MongoDB
Installing MongoDB and using the shell
Introducing mgo, a MongoDB driver for Go
RESTful API with Gorilla Mux and MongoDB
Boosting the querying performance with indexing
Designing an e-commerce data document model
Summary
6
Working with Protocol Buffers and GRPC
Working with Protocol Buffers and GRPC
Getting the code
Introduction to protocol buffers
Protocol buffer language
Compiling a protocol buffer with protoc
Introduction to GRPC
Bidirectional streaming with GRPC
Summary
7
Working with PostgreSQL, JSON, and Go
Working with PostgreSQL, JSON, and Go
Getting the code
Installing the PostgreSQL database
pq, a pure PostgreSQL database driver for Go
Implementing a URL shortening service using Postgres and pq
Exploring the JSON store in PostgreSQL
Summary
8
Building a REST API Client in Go and Unit Testing
Building a REST API Client in Go and Unit Testing
Getting the code
Plan for building a REST API client
Basics for writing a command-line tool in Go
grequests – a REST API package for Go
Getting comfortable with the GitHub REST API
Creating a CLI tool as an API client for the GitHub REST API
Using Redis for caching the API data
Creating a unit testing tool for our URL shortening service
Summary
9
Scaling Our REST API Using Microservices
Scaling Our REST API Using Microservices
Getting the code
What are microservices?
Monolith versus microservices
Go Kit, a package for building microservices
Summary
10
Deploying Our REST services
Deploying Our REST services
Getting the code
Installing and configuring Nginx
Monitoring our Go API server with Supervisord
Summary
11
Using an API Gateway to Monitor and Metricize REST API
Using an API Gateway to Monitor and Metricize REST API
Getting the code
Why is an API gateway required?
Kong, an open-source API gateway
Adding API to Kong
API logging in Kong
API authentication in Kong
API rate limiting in Kong
Kong CLI
Other API gateways
Summary
12
Handling Authentication for Our REST Services
Handling Authentication for Our REST Services
Getting the code
How authentication works
Introducing Postman, a tool for testing REST API
Persisting client sessions with Redis
Introduction to JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and OAuth2
OAuth 2 architecture and basics
Summary

Chapter 1. Getting Started with REST API Development

A web service is a communication mechanism defined between different computer systems. Without web services, custom peer-to-peer communication becomes cumbersome and platform specific. It is like a hundred different kinds of things that the web needs to understand and interpret. If computer systems align with the protocols that the web can understand easily, it is a great help. A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), https://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/.

Now, in simple words, a web service is a road between two endpoints where messages are transferred smoothly. Here, this transfer is usually one way. Two individual programmable entities can also communicate with each other through their own APIs. Two people communicate through language. Two applications communicate through the Application Programming Interface (API).

The reader might be wondering; what is the importance of the API in the current digital world? The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) made API usage heavier than before. Consciousness about the API is growing day by day, and there are hundreds of APIs that are being developed and documented all over the world every day. Notable major businesses are seeing futures in the API as a Service (AAAS). A bright example is Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a huge success in the cloud world. Developers write their own applications using the REST API provided by the AWS. 

A few more hidden use cases are from travel sites like Ibibo and Expedia, which fetch real-time prices by calling the APIs of third-party gateways and data vendors. Web services are often charged these days.

 

Topics to be covered in this chapter are: 

  • The different Web Services available
  • Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture in detail
  • Introduction to Single Page Applications (SPA) with REST
  • Setting up a Go project and running a development server
  • Building our first service for finding Roman numerals
  • Using Gulp to auto-compile Go code
Previous Section
End of Section 1
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