Book Image

Building Distributed Applications in Gin

By : Mohamed Labouardy
4 (1)
Book Image

Building Distributed Applications in Gin

4 (1)
By: Mohamed Labouardy

Overview of this book

Gin is a high-performance HTTP web framework used to build web applications and microservices in Go. This book is designed to teach you the ins and outs of the Gin framework with the help of practical examples. You’ll start by exploring the basics of the Gin framework, before progressing to build a real-world RESTful API. Along the way, you’ll learn how to write custom middleware and understand the routing mechanism, as well as how to bind user data and validate incoming HTTP requests. The book also demonstrates how to store and retrieve data at scale with a NoSQL database such as MongoDB, and how to implement a caching layer with Redis. Next, you’ll understand how to secure and test your API endpoints with authentication protocols such as OAuth 2 and JWT. Later chapters will guide you through rendering HTML templates on the server-side and building a frontend application with the React web framework to consume API responses. Finally, you’ll deploy your application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and learn how to automate the deployment process with a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. By the end of this Gin book, you will be able to design, build, and deploy a production-ready distributed application from scratch using the Gin framework.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Inside the Gin Framework
3
Section 2: Distributed Microservices
9
Section 3: Beyond the Basics

Introducing JWTs

According to Request for Comments (RFC) 7519 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519):

"A JSON Web Token (JWT) is an open standard that defines a compact and self-contained way for securely transmitting information between parties as a JSON object. This information can be verified and trusted because it is digitally signed. JWTs can be signed using a secret or a public/private key pair."

A JWT token consists of three parts separated by dots, as depicted in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.6 – JWT parts

The header indicates the algorithm used to generate the signature. The payload contains information about the user, along with the token expiration date. Finally, the signature is the result of hashing the header and payload parts with a secret key.

Now that we've seen how JWT works, let's integrate it into our API. To get started, install the JWT Go implementation with the following command:

go get github...