In this chapter, we tried to build a Metro Rail API with the help of a few web frameworks available in Go. The most popular ones are go-restful, Gin Gonic, and Revel.go. We started by learning our first database integration in our Go applications. We chose SQLite3 and tried to write a sample application using the go-sqlite3 library.

Next, we explored go-restful and looked in detail at how to create routes and handlers. go-restful has the concept of building APIs on top of resources. It provides an intuitive way of creating APIs that can consume and produce various formats such as XML and JSON. We used the train as a resource and built an API that performs CRUD operations on the database. We explained why go-restful is lightweight and can be used to create low latency APIs. Next, we saw the Gin framework and tried to repeat the same API, but created an API around the station resource. We saw how to store time in the SQL database time field. We suggested Gin for quickly prototyping your API.

Finally, we tried to create another API on the train resource, but this time with the Revel.go web framework. We started creating a project, inspected the directory structure, then moved on to write a few services (without db integration). We also saw how to run the application and change the port using a configuration file.

The main theme of this chapter was to give you a push towards a few wonderful frameworks for creating RESTful APIs. Each framework may do things differently, choose the one you are comfortable with. Use Revel.go when you need an end-to-end web application (templates and UI), use Gin to quickly create REST services, and use go-rest when the performance of the API is critical.