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

Protocol buffer language


A protocol buffer is a file with a minimalistic language syntax. We compile a protocol buffer and the target file is generated for a programming language. For example, in Go, the compiled file will be a .go file with structs mapping the protobuf file. In Java, a class file will be created. Think protocol buffer as the skeleton for data with a particular order. We need to know the types before jumping into the actual code. In order to make things easier, I am going to first show JSON and its equivalent in protocol buffers. Then, we will implement a solid example.

Note

Here, we are going to use proto3 as our protocol buffer version. There are slight variations in versions, but the latest one was released with improvements.

There are many types of protocol buffer elements. Some of them are:

  • Scalar values
  • Enumerations
  • Default values
  • Nested values
  • Unknown types

First, let us see how to define a message type in a protobuf. Here, we try to define a simple network interface message...