Building RESTful APIs with the Gin framework

Gin-gonic is a framework based on the httprouter. We learned about the httprouter in Chapter 2, Handling Routing for Our REST Services. It is an HTTP multiplexer like Gorilla Mux, but it is faster. Gin allows a high-level API to create REST services in a clean way. Gin compares itself with another web framework called martini. All web frameworks allow us to do a lot more things such as templating and web server design, additional to service creation. Install the Gin package using the following command:

go get gopkg.in/gin-gonic/gin.v1

Let us write a simple hello world program in Gin to get familiarized with the Gin constructs. The file is ginBasic.go:

package main
import (
    "time"
    "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
)
func main() {
    r := gin.Default()
    /* GET takes a route and a handler function
       Handler takes the gin context object
    */
    r.GET("/pingTime", func(c *gin.Context) {
        // JSON serializer is available on gin context...