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)

Summary

In this chapter, we first introduced the HTTP router. We tried to create HTTP routes using Go's net/http package. Then, we briefly discussed ServeMux with an example. We saw how to add multiple handler functions to multiple routes. Then, we introduced a lightweight router package called httprouter, which allows developers to create elegant routes, with the option of parsing parameters passed in the URL path.

We can also serve files over the HTTP using httprouter. We built a small service to get the Go version and file contents (read-only). That example can be extended to fetch any system information or run a system command.

Next, we introduced the popular Go routing library, gorilla/mux. We discussed how it is different from httprouter and explored its functionality by implementing two examples. We explained how Vars can be used to get path parameters and r.URL.Query to parse query parameters.

As part of securing API routes, we discussed SQL injection and how it can happen in our applications. We have also seen the counter measures. By the end of this chapter, one can define routes and handler functions to accept HTTP API requests.

In the next chapter, we will look at Middleware functions, which act as tamperers for HTTP requests and responses. That phenomenon helps us to modify the API response on the fly. The next chapter also features Remote Procedure Call (RPC).