Book Image

Building RESTful Web services with Go

By : Naren Yellavula
Book Image

Building RESTful Web services with Go

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.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating a basic API layout for URL shortening services


Have you ever wondered how URL shortening services work? They take a very long URL and give a shortened, crisp, and memorable URL back to the user. At first sight, it looks like magic, but it is a simple math trick.

In a single statement, URL shortening services are built upon two things:

  •  A string mapping algorithm to map long strings to short strings ( Base 62)
  •  A simple web server that redirects a short URL to the original URL

There are a few obvious advantages of URL shortening:

  • Users can remember the URL; easy to maintain
  • Users can use the links where there are restrictions on text length; for example, Twitter
  • Predictable shortened URL length

Take a look at the following diagram:

                            

 

Under the hood, these things happen silently in a URL shortening service:

  • Take the original URL.
  • Apply Base62 encoding on it. It generates a shortened URL.
  • Store that URL in the database. Map it to the original URl ([shortened_url: orignial_url...