Ghost - Build REST APIs from structs using Generics

Why Ghost?

We all love Go for it's high performance IO, Goroutines, channels etc but we also have to write boring REST APIs that required a lot of hand code writing. We had to repeat ourselves for each resource and when I read the "When To Use Generics" I thought, REST APIs are not a collection, but we are actually writing the exact same code multiple times. Is building REST APIs a generics thing? What's the minimal we could write to get a REST API?

What is Ghost?

Ghost is a collection of generic structs and interfaces that when composed, become a http.Handler that provides a REST API.

type User struct {
	Name string
}

type SearchQuery struct {
	Name string
}

func main() {
	store := ghost.NewMapStore(&User{}, SearchQuery{}, uint64(0))
	g := ghost.New(store)
	// g is a http.Handler and it provides GET /?name=:name, GET /:userid, POST /, PUT /:userid, DELETE /:userid
	http.ListenAndServe("127.0.0.1:8080", g)
}

Minimal work is to write your struct, choose a store from the stores and call ghost.New.
In reality you would write your own store. That's where the business logic is, and what translates into value.

What is generic in Ghost?

Ghost has 3 type parameters, R Resource, Q Query and P PKey.

Resource is the REST resource. Ghost provides CRUD operations for resources.

Query represents the query when searching for resources to return a list.

PKey is a key that identifies the resource. A primary key.

Types in Ghost

TODO

• [x] Validator
• [x] Hooks
• [x] Example using common ORMs
• [ ] OpenAPIv3 integration