Chapter 7. Go web services

Web services, as you’ll recall from our brief discussion in chapter 1, provide a service to other software programs. This chapter expands on this and shows how you can use Go to write or consume web services. You’ll learn how to create and parse XML and JSON first, because these are the most frequently used data formats with web services. We’ll also discuss SOAP and RESTful services before going through the steps for creating a simple web service in JSON.

7.1. Introducing web services

One of the more popular uses of Go is in writing web services that provide services and data to other web services or applications. Web services, at a basic level, are software programs that interact with other software programs. In other words, instead of having a human being as the end user, a web service has a software program as the end user. Web services, as the name suggests, communicate over HTTP (see figure 7.1).

Interestingly, though web applications are generally not solidly defined, you can find a definition of web services in a Web Services Architecture document by a W3C working group:

7.2. Introducing SOAP-based web services

7.3. Introducing REST-based web services

7.4. Parsing and creating XML with Go

7.5. Parsing and creating JSON with Go

7.6. Creating Go web services

7.7. Summary