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)

Getting Started with REST API Development

A web service is a communication mechanism defined between various computer systems. Without web services, custom peer-to-peer communication becomes cumbersome and platform-specific. The web needs to understand and interpret a hundred different things in the form of protocols. If computer systems can align with the protocols that the web can understand easily, it is a great help.

A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at https://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/.

Now, in simple words, a web service is a road between two endpoints where messages are transferred smoothly. The message transfer is usually one way. Two individual programmable entities can also communicate with each other through their own APIs. Two people communicate...