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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Getting Started with REST API Development

Getting Started with REST API Development

Technical requirements

Types of web services

REST verbs and status codes

The rise of the REST API with SPAs

Setting up the project and running the development server

Building our first service – finding the fastest mirror site from a list

Open API and Swagger

Free Chapter

Handling Routing for our REST Services

Handling Routing for our REST Services

Technical requirements

Understanding Go's net/http package

ServeMux – a basic router in Go

Understanding httprouter – a lightweight HTTP router

Introducing gorilla/mux – a powerful HTTP router

SQL injection in URLs and ways to avoid them

Reader's challenge – an API for URL shortening

Working with Middleware and RPC

Working with Middleware and RPC

Technical requirements

What is middleware?

Multiple middleware and chaining

Painless middleware chaining with Alice

Using Gorilla handlers middleware for logging

JSON-RPC using Gorilla RPC

Simplifying RESTful Services with Popular Go Frameworks

Simplifying RESTful Services with Popular Go Frameworks

Technical requirements

Introducing go-restful – a REST API framework

SQLite3 basics and CRUD operations

Building a Metro Rail API with go-restful

Building RESTful API with the Gin framework

Building a RESTful API with revel.go

Working with MongoDB and Go to Create a REST API

Working with MongoDB and Go to Create a REST API

Technical requirements

Introduction to MongoDB

Installing MongoDB and using the shell

Introducing mongo-driver, an official MongoDB driver for Go

RESTful API with gorilla/mux and MongoDB

Boosting the querying performance with indexing

Designing MongoDB documents for a delivery logistics API

Working with Protocol Buffers and gRPC

Working with Protocol Buffers and gRPC

Technical requirements

Introduction to protocol buffers

Protocol buffer language

Compiling a protocol buffer with protoc

Introduction to gRPC

Bidirectional streaming with gRPC

Working with PostgreSQL, JSON, and Go

Working with PostgreSQL, JSON, and Go

Technical requirements

Discussing PostgreSQL installation options

Introducing pq, a pure PostgreSQL database driver for Go

Implementing a URL-shortening service using PostgreSQL and pq

Exploring the JSONStore feature in PostgreSQL

Building a REST API Client in Go

Building a REST API Client in Go

Technical requirements

Plan for building a REST API client

Basics for writing a command-line tool in Go

Cobra, an advanced CLI library

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 to cache the API data

Asynchronous API Design

Asynchronous API Design

Technical requirements

Understanding sync/async API requests

Fan-in/fan-out of services

Delaying API jobs with queuing

Long-running task design

Caching strategies for APIs

Event-driven API

GraphQL and Go

Technical requirements

What is GraphQL?

Over-fetching and under-fetching problems in the REST API

Creating GraphQL clients in Go

Creating GraphQL servers in Go

Scaling our REST API Using Microservices

Scaling our REST API Using Microservices

Technical requirements

What are microservices?

Monoliths versus microservices

Introducing Go Micro, a package for building microservices

Adding logging to microservices

Containerizing REST Services for Deployment

Containerizing REST Services for Deployment

Technical requirements

Installing the Nginx server

What is a reverse proxy server?

Deploying a Go service using Nginx

Monitoring our Go API server with Supervisord

Makefile and Docker Compose-based deployment

Deploying REST Services on Amazon Web Services

Deploying REST Services on Amazon Web Services

Technical requirements

Basics for working with AWS

IaC with Terraform

Why is an API Gateway required?

Introducing Amazon API Gateway

Other API Gateways

Handling Authentication for our REST Services

Handling Authentication for our REST Services

Technical requirements

How simple authentication works

Introducing Postman, a visual client for testing a REST API

Persisting client sessions with Redis

Introducing JWT and OAuth2

JWT in an OAuth2.0 workflow

Security aspects of an API

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Summary

In this chapter, we built a Metro Rail API with the help of a few web frameworks available in Go. The most popular ones are go-restful, Gin Gonic, and revel.go. We have introduced a database layer in this chapter. We chose SQLite3 and tried to write a sample application using the go-sqlite3 library.

We then explored go-restful and looked in detail at how to create routes and handlers. go-restful has the concept of building APIs on top of resources. We explained why go-restful is lightweight and can be used to create low-latency APIs.

Next, we introduced the Gin framework and tried to re-implement the railAPI. Finally, we tried to create another API on the train resource, but this time with the revel.go web framework. Revel is a framework that is similar to Django and Ruby on Rails. It provides scaffolding for most of the server needs such as routing, handlers, and middleware...