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 gRPC

gRPC is a transport mechanism that sends and receives messages between two systems. Traditionally, these systems are a server and a client. As we described in the previous chapters, RPC can be implemented in Go for transferring JSON. We called it a JSON RPC service. Similarly, gRPC is specially designed to transfer data in the form of protocol buffers.

gRPC makes service creation easy and elegant. It provides a nice set of APIs that we can use to define services and start running them. In this section, we will focus on how to create a gRPC service and how to use it. The main advantage of gRPC is that it can be understood by multiple programming languages. Protocol buffers provide a common data structure. So, this combination enables seamless communication between various tech stacks and systems. This is the integral concept of distributed computing.

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