Inject DB connections in Golang gRPC API

 March 21, 2022

One of the first issues that I had to solve when I started to use gRPC was how to inject a DB connection pool to the function handling the request. The DB connection injection is needed because creating a new SQL connection every time there is a new gRPC request (and tearing it down at the end) is a massive waste of resources. Also, this approach could limit the scalability of the API since the database probably has a limited number of connections it will accept.

gRPC-Gateway 2 in Fedora

 February 22, 2022

gRPC is a very nice technology that allows the implementation of efficient APIs in a very efficient way. Thanks to gRPC and protobuf, you do not have to write much boilerplate code since the boilerplate code is generated automatically from the proto file. This works perfectly until both your client and server can perform gRPC calls. Luckily most of the languages have no issue with this. Still, the big exception is JavaScript (and other languages that will compile to JS, such as TypeScript) running in a browser.

CORS headers with gRPC-Gateway

 July 28, 2021

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on managing CORS headers with Negroni. Lately, I’ve created a new API server that needed to be accessible from the browser, but this time I used a different technology, more precisely gRPC-Gateway.

Few months after I wrote that blog post, I stopped writing new REST services by hand. I did not rewrite all the services that used the old paradigm just because they needed a fix or a new feature, but for all new services, I moved to gRPC with gRPC-Gateway.

Calling a SOAP service in Go

 December 3, 2018

Today the IT world is very focused on high performance, high throughput interfaces. In this situation, it is common to find REST and gRPC API, given their performances compared to the other solutions. Sometimes, though, we still encounter old API written with older techniques or new API that for some reasons have been developed with outdated technologies. One of those cases that I’ve encountered a few times over the last few months is SOAP.

CORS with Go and Negroni

 November 18, 2018

There are some pieces that you need to put in every microservice you write. Those are for instance logging, error handling, authentication.

Over the last year, I found myself writing over and over CORS headers. This requirement brought me to think that I should have used a Negroni middleware since we are already using Negroni for other middlewares. I started looking online for an already written one, and I found a bunch, but I was not happy with what I found, so I decided to write my own.

A small HTTP debug server in Go

 August 31, 2018

Lately, I found myself to work on an application that was communicating via SOAP with a server. My goal was to understand how this application worked with the SOAP server to emulate its behavior. Even if I had access to the source code of the application, I thought it would have been easier, faster and more fun to do the work without actually reading the code. It’s important to note that actually, the application is fairly small and self-contained. Otherwise, I would have probably taken a different approach.

RESTful Web APIs by Leonard Richardson, Mike Amundsen, Sam Ruby (O'Reilly Media)

 May 28, 2013

The API are now becoming more used every day. Today every major website provides it’s own set of API and often the company websites and services are chosen (or not chosen) based on the availability of API and their design.

In this huge world that is getting bigger every day, RESTful API plays a huge role, in fact a lot of companies are moving their API to RESTful API since it’s easier to use, therefore more attractive for potential clients.