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)

Building a REST API Client in Go

In this chapter, we are going to discuss how Go client applications work in depth. We will explore grequests, a Python requests-style library that allows us to make API calls from the Go code. Then, we'll write some client software that uses the GitHub API. While doing that, we'll try to learn about two Go libraries called cli and cobra. After learning about the fundamentals of those packages, we'll write an API testing tool for the command line. Then, we'll introduce Redis, an in-memory database that we can use to cache the API responses to back up the data.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • 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
  • Cobra, an advanced CLI library
  • Creating a CLI...