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Building RESTful Web services with Go

By : Naren Yellavula

3.8 (9)

Building RESTful Web services with Go

3.8 (9)

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.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deploying Our REST services

Deploying Our REST services

Getting the code

Installing and configuring Nginx

Monitoring our Go API server with Supervisord

Summary

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

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

Preface

Initially, SOAP-based web services became more popular with XML. Then, since 2012, REST picked up the pace and gulped SOAP in whole. The rise of a new generation of web languages, such as Python, JavaScript (Node.js), and Go, showed a different approach to web development compared to the traditional ones, such as ASP.NET and Spring. Since this decade, Go has become more and more popular due to its speed and intuitiveness. Less verbose code, strict type checking, and support for concurrency make Go a better choice for writing any web backend. Some of the best tools, such as Docker and Kubernetes, are written in Go. Google uses Go a lot in its daily activities. You can see a list of Go-using companies at https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoUsers.

For any internet company, the web development department is crucial. Data that the company accumulates needs to be served to the clients in form of an API or web service. Various clients (browser, mobile application, and server) consume API every day. REST is an architectural pattern that defines resource consumption in the form of methods.

Go is a better language to write web servers. It is the responsibility of an intermediate Go developer to know how to create RESTful services using the constructs available in the language. Once the basics are understood, the developer should learn other things, such as testing, optimizing, and deploying services. This book is an attempt to make the reader comfortable with developing web services.

Experts think that in the near future, as Python is moving into the Data Science space and competing with R, Go can emerge as the single go-to language in the web development space by competing with NodeJS. This book is not a cookbook. However, it offers many tips and tricks throughout your journey. By the end of the book, the reader will be comfortable with REST API development through a multitude of examples. They will also come to know about the latest practices, such as protocol buffers/gRPC/API Gateway, which will move their knowledge to the next level.

CONTINUE READING

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Programming languages

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