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)

Understanding sync/async API requests

A synchronous request is an HTTP request that blocks the server until the response is returned. The majority of the services on the web run in this fashion. Nowadays, with the advent of distributed systems and loose coupling, API requests can also be asynchronous. In other words, an asynchronous request returns with information that can be used to fetch the information of a process. These asynchronous requests on a server are closely related to how concurrently the server can execute a job for multiple clients. Let's look at what a synchronous request looks like:

In this type of request, the web server performs all the actions and returns an Immediate Response to the Web client/Mobile client. The drawback of this approach is that if the server takes too much time to render the result, the client is blocked on the server's action...