Book Image

Go: Building Web Applications

By : Nathan Kozyra, Mat Ryer
Book Image

Go: Building Web Applications

By: Nathan Kozyra, Mat Ryer

Overview of this book

Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It is a statically typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collection, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library. This course starts with a walkthrough of the topics most critical to anyone building a new web application. Whether it’s keeping your application secure, connecting to your database, enabling token-based authentication, or utilizing logic-less templates, this course has you covered. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of the projects, and the lessons learned throughout this course will arm you with everything you need to build world-class solutions. It will also take you through the history of concurrency, how Go utilizes it, how Go differs from other languages, and the features and structures of Go's concurrency core. It will make you feel comfortable designing a safe, data-consistent, and high-performance concurrent application in Go. This course is an invaluable resource to help you understand Go's powerful features to build simple, reliable, secure, and efficient web applications.
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 3. Three Ways to Implement Profile Pictures

So far, our chat application has made use of the OAuth2 protocol to allow users to sign in to our application so that we know who is saying what. In this chapter, we are going to add profile pictures to make the chatting experience more engaging.

We will look at the following ways to add pictures or avatars alongside the messages in our application:

  • Using the avatar picture provided by the authentication server
  • Using the Gravatar.com web service to look up a picture by the user's e-mail address
  • Allowing the user to upload their own picture and host it themselves

The first two options allow us to delegate the hosting of pictures to a third party—either an authentication service or Gravatar.com—which is great because it reduces the cost of hosting our application (in terms of storage costs and bandwidth, since the user's browsers will actually download the pictures from the servers of the authenticating service...