Creating a Functional RESTful Server

This lesson illustrates how to develop a RESTful server in Go, given a REST API. The biggest difference between the presented RESTful service and the phone book application created in this previous lesson is that the RESTful service in this chapter uses JSON messages everywhere, whereas the phone book application interacts and works using plain text messages. If we are thinking of using net/http for the implementation of the RESTful server, please do not do so! This implementation uses the gorilla/mux package, which is a much better choice because it supports subrouters—more about that in the “Using gorilla/mux” section.

The purpose of the RESTful server is to implement a login/authentication system. The purpose of the login system is to keep track of the users who are logged in, as well as their permissions. The system comes with a default administrator user named admin—the default password is also admin, and we should change it. The application stores its data in a database (PostgreSQL), which means that if we restart it, the list of existing users is read from that database and is not lost.

The REST API

The API of an application helps us implement the functionality that we have in mind. However, this is a job for the client, not the server. The job of the server is to facilitate the job of its clients as much as possible by supporting a simple yet fully working functionality through a properly defined and implemented REST API. Make sure that we understand that before ...