In this chapter, we gave an introduction to the REST API. We saw that REST is not a protocol, but an architectural pattern. HTTP is the actual protocol on which we can implement our REST service. We jumped into the fundamentals of the REST API to be clear about what they actually are. Then we explored types of web services. Before REST, we have something called SOAP, which uses XML as the data format. REST operates on JSON as the primary format. REST has verbs and status codes. We saw what a given status code refers to. We built a simple service which serves the Roman numerals for given numbers. In this process, we also saw how to package a Go project. We understood the GOPATH environment variable. It is a workspace defining a variable in Go. All packages and projects reside in that path. We then saw how to reload a development project on the fly with the help of supervisord and Gulp. These are node tools but can help us to keep our Go project up and running.
In the next chapter, we dig deeper into URL routing. Starting from the built-in router, we explore Gorilla Mux, a powerful URL routing library.
