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

Compiling a protocol buffer with protoc


Until now, we have discussed how to write a protocol buffer file that is previously written in JSON or another data format. But, how do we actually integrate it into our programs? Remember that protocol buffers are data formats, no more than that. They are a format of communication between various systems, similar to JSON. These are the practical steps we follow for using protobufs in our Go programs:

  1. Install the protoc command-line tool and the proto library.
  2. Write a protobuf file with the .proto extension.
  3. Compile it to target a programming language (here, it is Go).
  4. Import structs from the generated target file and serialize the data.
  5. On a remote machine, receive the serialized data and decode it into a struct or class. 

Take a look at the following diagram:

 

The first step is to install the protobuf compiler on our machine. For this, download the protobuf package from https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases. On macOS X, we can install protobuf using...