Luddite Service Framework Package, Version 2

Luddite is a golang package that provides a micro-framework for RESTful web services. It is built around extensible, pluggable middleware layers and includes a flexible resource abstraction that makes it easy to implement services that comply with the Orion REST API Standards.

To run the example service:

$ make all
$ cd example
$ ./example -c config.yaml

Request Handling

The basic request handling built into luddite combines CORS, tracing, logging, metrics, profiling, and recovery actions.

Tracing generates a unique request id and optionally records traces to a file or persistent backend. The framework currently uses v2 of the trace package.

Logging is based on logrus. A service log is established for general use. An access log is maintained separately. Both use structured JSON logging.

Prometheus metrics provide basic request/response stats. By default, the metrics endpoint is served on /metrics.

The standard net/http/pprof profiling handlers may be optionally enabled. These are served on /debug/pprof.

Recovery handles panics that occur in resource handlers and optionally includes stack traces in 500 responses.

Request Middleware

Currently, luddite registers two middleware handlers for each service:

• Negotiation: Performs JSON (default) and XML content negotiation based on HTTP requests' Accept headers.

• Version: Performs API version selection and enforces the service's min/max supported version constraints. Makes the selected API version available to resource handlers as part of the request context.

Implementations are free to register their own additional middleware handlers in addition to these two.

Resource Abstraction

Generally, each resource falls into one of two categories.

• Collection: Supports GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
• Singleton: Supports GET and PUT.

The framework defines several interfaces that establish its resource abstraction. For collection-style resources:

• CollectionLister returns all elements in response to GET /resource.
• CollectionCounter returns a count of its elements in response to GET /resource/all/count.
• CollectionGetter returns a specific element in response to GET /resource/:id.
• CollectionCreator creates a new element in response to POST /resource.
• CollectionUpdater updates a specific element in response to PUT /resource/:id.
• CollectionDeleter deletes a specific element in response to DELETE /resource/:id. It may also optionally delete the entire collection in response to DELETE /resource
• CollectionActioner executes an action in response to POST /resource/:id/:action.

And for singleton-style resources:

• SingletonGetter returns a response to GET /resource.
• SingletonUpdater is updated in response to PUT /resource.
• SingletonActioner executes an action in response to POST /resource/:action.

Routes are automatically created for resource handler types that implement these interfaces. However, since luddite is a framework, implementations retain substantial flexibility to register their own routes if these are not sufficient.

Resource Versioning

The framework allows implementations to support multiple API versions simultaneously. In addition to API version selection via middleware, the framework also allows for version-specific resource registration.

Typically, implementations define a separate resource handler type for each API version. The routes for each type are registered in a version-specific router. Since route lookup occurs after version negotiation, each router is free to handle requests without further consideration of API version.