Alex

HTTP and Networking in Go (Video 15)

• net/http is the standard library package for HTTP networking
• The core interface in this library for handling requests is

type Handler interface {
  ServeHTTP(http.ResponseWriter, *http.Request)
}

• The library also defines a helper method on functions with that signature that makes them conform to the Handler interface:

type HandlerFunc func(ResponseWriter, *Request)

// This is a method declaration on a function type
func (f HandlerFunc) ServeHTTP(w ResponseWriter, r *Request) {
  f(w, r)
}

// Then we can define a function that conforms to that interface without 
// requiring explicit implementation of ServeHTTPz§
func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
  fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, world")
}

• Go allows methods to be put on any declared type, including functions as is the case in the above example
• http.Template is a package for doing HTTP templating

var form = `
<h1>Todo #</h1>
<div></div>

• Above is an example of a template string for the http.Template library to populate. It uses double bracket syntax for templating and has directives like printf to do formatting. It will pull values from the fields specified in the template, e.g. pulling the ID from the .ID field of some struct
• More reading / work on HTTP bits will be done in the future