Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By : Naren Yellavula
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By: Naren Yellavula

Overview of this book

Building RESTful web services can be tough as there are countless standards and ways to develop API. In modern architectures such as microservices, RESTful APIs are common in communication, making idiomatic and scalable API development crucial. This book covers basic through to advanced API development concepts and supporting tools. You’ll start with an introduction to REST API development before moving on to building the essential blocks for working with Go. You’ll explore routers, middleware, and available open source web development solutions in Go to create robust APIs, and understand the application and database layers to build RESTful web services. You’ll learn various data formats like protocol buffers and JSON, and understand how to serve them over HTTP and gRPC. After covering advanced topics such as asynchronous API design and GraphQL for building scalable web services, you’ll discover how microservices can benefit from REST. You’ll also explore packaging artifacts in the form of containers and understand how to set up an ideal deployment ecosystem for web services. Finally, you’ll cover the provisioning of infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IaC) and secure your REST API. By the end of the book, you’ll have intermediate knowledge of web service development and be able to apply the skills you’ve learned in a practical way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Creating GraphQL clients in Go

When the Go program is a client for the GraphQL server, the client should understand how to compose GraphQL queries correctly and send them to the server. Go cannot do that natively, but it can with the help of an external package called machinebox/graphql. This is a lightweight client that allows developers to send queries and mutations to servers.

We can install the package using the dep tool:

dep ensure -add github.com/machinebox/graphql

Let's write a tool for fetching data from GitHub's GraphQL API. For that, create a project directory called graphqlClient:

mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/git-user/chapter10/graphqlClient
touch $GOPATH/src/github.com/git-user/chapter10/graphqlClient/main.go

The goal here is to fetch the details of all the available licenses for GitHub projects. GitHub provides an API to fetch all available licenses, but...