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)

Introduction to protocol buffers

HTTP/1.1 is the standard that is adopted by the web community. In recent times, HTTP/2 is becoming more popular because of its advantages. Some of the benefits of using HTTP/2 are as follows:

  • Flow control between sender and receiver
  • Better compression of HTTP headers
  • Single TCP connection for bidirectional streaming
  • Server push support for sending files on one TCP connection
  • Support from all major browsers

The technical definition from Google about protocol buffers is as follows:

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data—think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use the specially generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages...