Book Image

Distributed Computing with Go

By : V.N. Nikhil Anurag
Book Image

Distributed Computing with Go

By: V.N. Nikhil Anurag

Overview of this book

Distributed Computing with Go gives developers with a good idea how basic Go development works the tools to fulfill the true potential of Golang development in a world of concurrent web and cloud applications. Nikhil starts out by setting up a professional Go development environment. Then you’ll learn the basic concepts and practices of Golang concurrent and parallel development. You’ll find out in the new few chapters how to balance resources and data with REST and standard web approaches while keeping concurrency in mind. Most Go applications these days will run in a data center or on the cloud, which is a condition upon which the next chapter depends. There, you’ll expand your skills considerably by writing a distributed document indexing system during the next two chapters. This system has to balance a large corpus of documents with considerable analytical demands. Another use case is the way in which a web application written in Go can be consciously redesigned to take distributed features into account. The chapter is rather interesting for Go developers who have to migrate existing Go applications to computationally and memory-intensive environments. The final chapter relates to the rather onerous task of testing parallel and distributed applications, something that is not usually taught in standard computer science curricula.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

HTTP and sessions

In this section we will take a brief look at the HTTP protocol and how it has evolved over time. Also discuss how servers keep track of user state using HTTP sessions. This knowledge will come in handy when we try to understand how REST protocol works.

A brief history of HTTP

In order to better understand the advantages of the REST protocol, let us take a small detour into how the internet was used before the REST web protocol came onto the scene. The internet in 1990s was mostly used to store and share documents as marked up documents using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). For this chapter, HTTP can be summarized as follows:

  • HTTP is a network communication protocol that starts with an HTTP request and...