webapp-with-golang-anti-textbook

Table of Contents
Introduction

Installation and Tools

Tools
Go basic knowledge

1.1
2

Hello, Go

2.1

Go foundation

2.2

Control statements and functions

2.3

struct

2.4

Object-oriented

2.5

interface

2.6

Concurrency

2.7

Summary

2.8

General
Web Programming Basics
Implementation

3
3.1
4

Designing our web app

4.1

Database Handling

4.2

Webapp Example

4.3

Form handling
Uploading Files

5
5.1

Templates

User Authentication

Working with Files

Routing

Contributors

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About the book

Please note that the book is a work in progress.
This book was written to teach how to develop web applications in Go for people who know
a bit of Go and have basic information about web applications in general.
We (you) will build a webapp without using a third party framework and using as few external
libraries as possible. The advantage is that you'll learn a lot when you code without a
framework.
The book has a code section in the github repo where it is hosted, you are recommended to
download the code too because it is the best way to learn the most out of this book. The
code will contain simple example of the concept, you would be required to take the code
ahead and build whatever app you are planning to build.
I hereby present to you the anti text book.
The Go Programming Basics section has been adapted from build-web-application-withgolang by astaxie Links were updated to refer the correct aspects of the current book, titles
were updated to fit into this book.
Git book link

Code
The book comes with corresponding code, please use it to understand the book completely,
the book is just plain old theory if you do not check the code out. The code is present in the
code folder in this repository itself.

Contributing
I don't profess to be a God of either Go or webdev or anything in general, and I don't claim
that this is the best book for learning how to build web appplications with Go, but I do believe
that good things happen when people collaborate, so pull requests are not only appreciated,
but they are welcome.

Philosophy
Introduction

webapp-with-golang-anti-textbook

Through this book we want to teach how to develop web applications in Go. We expect
the reader to know the basics of Go but we assume the reader knows nothing about
how to write web applications
The book shall comprise of chapters, if the topic is huge and doesn't fit into one chapter,
then we split into multiple chapters, if possible.
Each chapter should be split into logical parts or sections with a meaningful title which'll
teach the reader something.
Every concept should be accompanied by the Go code (if there is any), for sneak peek
type sections write the Go pseudo code, writing just the necessary parts of the code and
keeping everything else.
The code shouldn't be more than 80 characters wide because in the PDF versions of
the book the code is invisible.
Brevity is the soul of wit, so keep the description as small as possible. But this doesn't
mean that we should just assume that the reader knows the concept and skip it in such
cases do explain the concept.
In the todo list manager which we are creating, we'll strive to implement as much
functionality as possible to give a taste of practical Go programming to the reader, but
we should mention as a note the other way, suppose you re-implement a function like
ParseGlob by listing all html files and using ParseFiles to parse them, we should

mention about the function ParseGlob

The main title should have one #, sections should have 3 #'s note should have 6 #'s
(note should have a title too)
Multi line code should have three tabs indentation, single line of code can be indented
using tabs or by backticks.
Written with love in India.
Disclaimer: The gopher in the cover page is taken from
https://golang.org/doc/gopher/appenginegophercolor.jpg without modifications since it is
under Creative Commons license.

License:
Book License: CC BY-SA 3.0 License

Links
Next section: Installation and Tools

Introduction

webapp-with-golang-anti-textbook

Installation
If you know about installation or have installed Go, you can skip to Tools.
This chapter is taken from install page verbatim, except for the changes to be made to adapt
to this book's styling format.

System requirements
Go binary distributions are available for these supported operating systems and
architectures. Please ensure your system meets these requirements before proceeding. If
your OS or architecture is not on the list, you may be able to install from source or use gccgo
instead
Operating system

Architectures

Notes

FreeBSD 8-STABLE
or later

amd64

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD not supported

Linux 2.6.23 or later

with glibc

amd64, 386,
arm

CentOS/RHEL 5.x not supported; install

from source for ARM

Mac OS X 10.7 or
later

amd64

use the clang or gcc that comes with

Xcode

Windows XP or later

amd64, 386

use MinGW gcc. No need for cygwin or

msys

gcc is required only if you plan to use cgo.

You only need to install the command line tools for Xcode. If you have already installed
Xcode 4.3+, you can install it from the Components tab of the Downloads preferences panel.

Install the Go tools

If you are upgrading from an older version of Go you must first remove the existing version.
Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD tarballs
Download the archive and extract it into /usr/local , creating a Go tree in /usr/local/go .
For example:
tar -C /usr/local -xzf go$VERSION.$OS-$ARCH.tar.gz

Installation and Tools

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Choose the archive file appropriate for your installation. For instance, if you are installing Go
version 1.2.1 for 64-bit x86 on Linux, the archive you want is called go1.2.1.linuxamd64.tar.gz.

(Typically these commands must be run as root or through sudo.)

Add /usr/local/go/bin to the PATH environment variable. You can do this by adding this
line to your /etc/profile (for a system-wide installation) or $HOME/.profile:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Installing to a custom location

The Go binary distributions assume they will be installed in /usr/local/go (or c:\Go under
Windows), but it is possible to install the Go tools to a different location. In this case you
must set the GOROOT environment variable to point to the directory in which it was
installed.
For example, if you installed Go to your home directory you should add the following
commands to $HOME/.profile:
export GOROOT=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin

Note: GOROOT must be set only when installing to a custom location.

Mac OS X package installer

Download the package file, open it, and follow the prompts to install the Go tools. The
package installs the Go distribution to /usr/local/go .
The package should put the /usr/local/go/bin directory in your PATH environment
variable. You may need to restart any open Terminal sessions for the change to take effect.
Windows
The Go project provides two installation options for Windows users (besides installing from
source): a zip archive that requires you to set some environment variables and an MSI
installer that configures your installation automatically. MSI installer
Open the MSI file and follow the prompts to install the Go tools. By default, the installer puts
the Go distribution in c:\Go.
The installer should put the c:\Go\bin directory in your PATH environment variable. You
may need to restart any open command prompts for the change to take effect. Zip archive
Download the zip file and extract it into the directory of your choice (we suggest c:\Go).

Installation and Tools

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If you chose a directory other than c:\Go , you must set the GOROOT environment variable
to your chosen path.
Add the bin subdirectory of your Go root (for example, c:\Go\bin ) to your PATH
environment variable. Setting environment variables under Windows
Under Windows, you may set environment variables through the "Environment Variables"
button on the "Advanced" tab of the "System" control panel. Some versions of Windows
provide this control panel through the "Advanced System Settings" option inside the
"System" control panel. Test your installation
Check that Go is installed correctly by setting up a workspace and building a simple
program, as follows.
Create a directory to contain your workspace, $HOME/work for example, and set the
GOPATH environment variable to point to that location.
$ export GOPATH=$HOME/work

You should put the above command in your shell startup script ( $HOME/.profile for
example) or, if you use Windows, follow the instructions above to set the GOPATH
environment variable on your system.
Next, make the directories src/github.com/user/hello inside your workspace (if you use
GitHub, substitute your user name for user), and inside the hello directory create a file
named hello.go with the following contents:
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("hello, world\n")
}

Then compile it with the go tool:

$ go install github.com/user/hello

The above command will put an executable command named hello (or hello.exe) inside the
bin directory of your workspace. Execute the command to see the greeting:
$ $GOPATH/bin/hello

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hello, world
If you see the "hello, world" message then your Go installation is working.
Before rushing off to write Go code please read the How to Write Go Code document, which
describes some essential concepts about using the Go tools. Uninstalling Go
To remove an existing Go installation from your system delete the go directory. This is
usually /usr/local/go under Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD or c:\Go under Windows.
You should also remove the Go bin directory from your PATH environment variable. Under
Linux and FreeBSD you should edit /etc/profile or $HOME/.profile . If you installed Go
with the Mac OS X package then you should remove the /etc/paths.d/go file. Windows
users should read the section about setting environment variables under Windows. Getting
help
For real-time help, ask the helpful gophers in #go-nuts on the Freenode IRC server.
The official mailing list for discussion of the Go language is Go Nuts.
Report bugs using the Go issue tracker.

Links
Directory
Next section: Tools

Installation and Tools

webapp-with-golang-anti-textbook

Tools
For html: Brackets, a text editor for the web by Adobe. For Go: Any IDE of your choice which
has a Go language plugin.

gofmt
gofmt is a built in formatting tool. This simple tool formats our gocode according to the
standard format, so it doesn't matter who wrote it because once we want to check in the
code, we can format it, this saves a lot of time. Almost all IDEs provide the gofmt on save
feature, then you can use this gofmt -w Tasks , where Tasks is my folder name. This code
will run gofmt on each go file in my project. If you are in Tasks folder then you can do this
gofmt -w .

We also have a go fmt tool along with gofmt, it runs gofmt -w on all files present in the
current folder.
It is a good practice to run gofmt on our code before committing to version control since it
standardizes formatting of the entire codebase.

godoc
Godoc is a built in documentation tool, when we write gocode, we are expected to give
comments to each exported function and pretty much every important place because the
exported functions are to be used by some random third party, they should have a comment
explaining their use and the syntax. Also godoc scans your $GOPATH and generates
documentation on a server, the golang.org website is godoc running in production. When
you start the godoc server, you'll notice that it gives you a html front end to the
documentation of all your Go code,
The -v flag is for verbose, for some reason godoc doesn't notify the user by printing on the
terminal that "server started on port 8080", so we have to use the -v mode to get to know
when the server started running, because it is rather annoying to keep opening the
localhost:6060 URL ten times when in the fifteenth time the server has started. If you want

to jump to any specific package, go to /pkg/name, for instance if you want to go to the
documentation of net/http the link is localhost:6060/pkg/net/http
Usage: godoc -http=:6060 -v

go test
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go test is the testing tool for Go. If you are writing the test cases for main.go the file

should be called main_test.go . We'll see more about testing in later chapters where we
start to write Go code.

go build
This is the build tool in Go. When you run it on your project root it'll build the project, the
binary will be named after the name of your root folder, for instance if I build my Tasks
application, the since the folder is Tasks in my src tree, the binary will be named Tasks .
You can instruct go build to create a binary of any name by running go build -o task so it'll
create a binary with the name of task. A go package can have only one main file, but a
project can have multiple go files, you can also give the name of the file you want to build as
go build file.go

Note Cross compilation

Go provides you with the ability to cross compile code across platforms.
env GOOS=darwin GOARCH=386 go build -o tasks.app
env GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 go build -o tasks.exe

If there are no quirks on the libraries, should give you a binary for the respective platforms.

go run
As we have seen, we can use go build to generate a binary, what if we just want to run it
once but don't care for a binary. This is the reason go run was created, it builds your project
and runs it in the /tmp directory so a binary isn't left in your project directory.

go get
This is a way to install packages from various websites like github, bitbucket, launchpad.
What go get does is it clones the repo in your $GOPATH/src folder and runs go install on
the package, which in turn creates a .a file and puts it in the respective $GOPATH/pkg
folder tree

go install
You can install your applications in your $GOPATH/bin using this command. It builds the
project and places a binary directly in the $GOPATH/bin . If you want to use the installed
applications then you need to add the $GOPATH/bin in your path.

Tools

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Links
Directory
Previous section: Installation
For those who want to learn Go
Go Programming Basics
If you are comfortable with Go, you can skip the next section which is for those who are new
to Go.
Web Programming basics

Tools

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2 Go Programming Basics
Go is a compiled system programming language, and it belongs to the C-family. However, its
compilation speed is much faster than other C-family languages. It has only 25 keywords...
even less than the 26 letters of the English alphabet! Let's take a look at these keywords
before we get started.
break default func interface select
case defer go map struct
chan else goto package switch
const fallthrough if range type
continue for import return var

In this chapter, I'm going to teach you some basic Go knowledge. You will find out how
concise the Go programming language is, and the beautiful design of the language.
Programming can be very fun in Go. After we complete this chapter, you'll be familiar with
the above keywords.

Links
Directory
Previous chapter: Chapter 1 Summary
Next section: "Hello, Go"

Go basic knowledge

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What makes Go different from other

languages?
The Go programming language was created with one goal in mind, to be able to build
scalable web-applications for large scale audiences in a large team. So that is the reason
they made the language as standardized as possible, hence the gofmt tool and the strict
usage guidelines to the language was for the sake of not having two factions in the
developer base, in other languages there are religous wars on where to keep the opening
brace?
public static void main() {
}
or
public static void main()
{
}

or for python should we use 4 spaces or 6 spaces or a tab or two tabs and other user
preferences.
While this might seem to be a shallow problem at the top, but when the codebase grows and
more and more people are working on the same code base, then it is difficult to maintain the
code's "beauty", if you know python then you might be aware of PEP8, which is a set of
guidelines about how to write elegant code. We live in a world where robots can drive a car,
so we shouldn't just write code, we should write elegant code.
For other languages there are many variables when it comes to writing code, every
language is good for its use case, but Go is a little special in that turf because it was
designed at a company which is the very synonym of the Internet (and distributed
computing), typically the flow of writing code goes from Python to Java to C++ for
optimization purposes, but the problem is that almost all languages which are widely in use
right now were written decades ago when 1GB storage costed a lot as compared to now,
where storage and computing has gotten cheap. Computers are getting multiples cores
these days and the "old languages" don't harness concurrency in a way that go does, not
because those languages are bad, but simply because that usecase wasn't relevant when
the languages evolved.

Hello, Go

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So to mitigate all the problems that Google faced with the current tools, they wrote a
systems language called Go, which you are about to learn! There are many many
advantages to using golang, and there might be disadvantages too for every coin has both
sides. But significant improvements in places like code formatting, since they desinged the
language in such a way that there won't be wars on how to format code, the gocode written
by anyone in the world (assuming they know and use gofmt ) will look exactly the same, this
won't seem to matter until you work in a team! also when the company uses automated code
review or some other fancy technique then in other languages which don't have strict and
standard formatting rules then the code might get screwed up, but not in go!
Go was designed with concurrency in mind, please note that parallelism != concurrency,
there is an amazing post by Rob Pike on the golang blog, blog.golang.org, you will find it
there, it is worth a read.
Another very important change that go has brought in programming that I personally love is
the concept of GOPATH , gone are the days when you had to create a folder called code and
then create workspaces for eclipse and what not, not you have to keep one folder tree for go
code and it'll be updated by the package manager automatically. Also under the code we are
recommended to create folders with either a custom domain or the github domain, for
example I created a task manager using golang so I created a set of folders
~/go/src/github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks

Note:
In *nix systems ~ stands for home directory, which is the windows equivalent of
C:\\Users\\username

The ~/go/ is the universe for the go code in your machine, it is just a significant
improvement over other languages so we can store the code efficiently without hassles, it
might seem strange at first, but it does make a lot of sense over the ridiculous package
names some other languages use like reverse domains.
note: along with src there are two folders pkg which is for packages and bin which is for
binary
This GOPATH advantage isn't just restricted to storing code in particular folder, but when you
have created five packages for your project then you don't have to import them like "import
./db" , you can give it import "github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/db" , so while doing a go
get on my repo, the go tool will find the package from github.com/... path if it wasn't

downloaded initially, it just standardizes a lot of screwed up things in the programming

discipline.

Hello, Go

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While some complain that go creators have ignored all language research done since the
past 30yrs, well, it might be true, but then again you can' create a product or a language
which everyone will fall in love with, there are always some or the other use cases or
constraints which the creators should consider, and considering all the advantages at least
for web development I do not think any language gets close to the advantages which go
has even if you ignore all that I said above, go is a compiled language which means in
production you'll not setup a JVM or a virtualenv you will have a single static binary! And
like an icing on a cake, all the modern libraries are in the standard library, like the http ,
which is a major advantage, which is the reason you can create webapps in golang without
using a third party web framework

2.1 Hello, Go
Before we start building an application in Go, we need to learn how to write a simple
program. You can't expect to build a building without first knowing how to build its
foundation. Therefore, we are going to learn the basic syntax to run some simple programs
in this section.

Program
According to international practice, before you learn how to program in some languages, you
will want to know how to write a program to print "Hello world".
Are you ready? Let's Go!
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("Hello, world or or or \n")
}

It prints following information.

Hello, world or or or

Explanation
Hello, Go

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One thing that you should know in the first is that Go programs are composed by package .
package <pkgName> (In this case is package main ) tells us this source file belongs to main

package, and the keyword main tells us this package will be compiled to a program instead
of package files whose extensions are .a .
Every executable program has one and only one main package, and you need an entry
function called main without any arguments or return values in the main package.
In order to print Hello, world , we called a function called Printf . This function is coming
from fmt package, so we import this package in the third line of source code, which is
import "fmt"

The way to think about packages in Go is similar to Python, and there are some advantages:
Modularity (break up your program into many modules) and reusability (every module can be
reused in many programs). We just talked about concepts regarding packages, and we will
make our own packages later.
On the fifth line, we use the keyword func to define the main function. The body of the
function is inside of {} , just like C, C++ and Java.
As you can see, there are no arguments. We will learn how to write functions with arguments
in just a second, and you can also have functions that have no return value or have several
return values.
On the sixth line, we called the function Printf which is from the package fmt . This was
called by the syntax <pkgName>.<funcName> , which is very like Python-style.
As we mentioned in chapter 1, the package's name and the name of the folder that contains
that package can be different. Here the <pkgName> comes from the name in package
<pkgName> , not the folder's name.

You may notice that the example above contains many non-ASCII characters. The purpose
of showing this is to tell you that Go supports UTF-8 by default. You can use any UTF-8
character in your programs.
Each go file is in some package, and that package should be a distint folder in the GOPATH,
but main is a special package which doesn't require a main folder. This is one aspect which
they left out for standardization! But should you choose to make a main folder then you have
to ensure that you run the binary properly. Also one go code can't have more than one
main go file.
~/go/src/github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/main $ go build
~/go/src/github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks $ ./main/main

Hello, Go

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the thing here is that when your code is using some static files or something else, then you
ought to run the binary from the root of the application as we see in the second line above, I
am running the main binary outside the main package, sometimes you might wonder why
your application isn't working then this might be one of the possible problems, please keep
this in mind.
One thing you will notice here is that go doesn't see to use semi colons to end a statement,
well, it does, just there is a minor catch, the programmer isn't expected to put semi colons,
the compiler adds semi colons to the gocode when it compiles which is the reason that this
(thankfully!) is a syntax error
func main ()
{
}

because the compiler adds a semi colon at the end of main() which is a syntax error and
as stated above, it helps avoid religious wars, i wish they combine vim and emacs and
create a universal editor which'll help save some more wars! But for now we'll learn Go.

Conclusion
Go uses package (like modules in Python) to organize programs. The function main.main()
(this function must be in the main package) is the entry point of any program. Go
standardizes language and most of the programming methodology, saving time of
developers which they'd have wasted in religious wars. There can be only one main
package and only one main function inside a go main package. Go supports UTF-8
characters because one of the creators of Go is a creator of UTF-8, so Go has supported
multiple languages from the time it was born.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Go basic knowledge
Next section: Go foundation

Hello, Go

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2.2 Go foundation
In this section, we are going to teach you how to define constants, variables with elementary
types and some skills in Go programming.

Define variables
There are many forms of syntax that can be used to define variables in Go.
The keyword var is the basic form to define variables, notice that Go puts the variable type
after the variable name.

// define a variable with name variableName and type "type"

var variableName type

Define multiple variables.

// define three variables which types are "type"
var vname1, vname2, vname3 type

Define a variable with initial value.

// define a variable with name variableName, type "type" and value "value"
var variableName type = value

Define multiple variables with initial values.

/*
Define three variables with type "type", and initialize their values.
vname1 is v1, vname2 is v2, vname3 is v3
*/
var vname1, vname2, vname3 type = v1, v2, v3

Do you think that it's too tedious to define variables use the way above? Don't worry,
because the Go team has also found this to be a problem. Therefore if you want to define
variables with initial values, we can just omit the variable type, so the code will look like this
instead:

Go foundation

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/*
Define three variables without type "type", and initialize their values.
vname1 is v1vname2 is v2vname3 is v3
*/
var vname1, vname2, vname3 = v1, v2, v3

Well, I know this is still not simple enough for you. Let's see how we fix it.
/*
Define three variables without type "type" and without keyword "var", and initialize their values.
vname1 is v1vname2 is v2vname3 is v3
*/
vname1, vname2, vname3 := v1, v2, v3

Now it looks much better. Use := to replace var and type , this is called a brief
statement. But wait, it has one limitation: this form can only be used inside of functions. You
will get compile errors if you try to use it outside of function bodies. Therefore, we usually
use var to define global variables.
_ (blank) is a special variable name. Any value that is given to it will be ignored. For

example, we give 35 to b , and discard 34 .( This example just show you how it
works. It looks useless here because we often use this symbol when we get function
return values. )
_, b := 34, 35

If you don't use variables that you've defined in your program, the compiler will give you
compilation errors. Try to compile the following code and see what happens.
package main
func main() {
var i int
}

Constants
So-called constants are the values that are determined during compile time and you cannot
change them during runtime. In Go, you can use number, boolean or string as types of
constants.

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Define constants as follows.

const constantName = value
// you can assign type of constants if it's necessary
const Pi float32 = 3.1415926

More examples.
const Pi = 3.1415926
const i = 10000
const MaxThread = 10
const prefix = "astaxie_"

Elementary types
Boolean
In Go, we use bool to define a variable as boolean type, the value can only be true or
false , and false will be the default value. ( You cannot convert variables' type

between number and boolean! )

// sample code
var isActive bool // global variable
var enabled, disabled = true, false // omit type of variables
func test() {
var available bool // local variable
valid := false // brief statement of variable
available = true // assign value to variable
}

Numerical types
Integer types include both signed and unsigned integer types. Go has int and uint at the
same time, they have same length, but specific length depends on your operating system.
They use 32-bit in 32-bit operating systems, and 64-bit in 64-bit operating systems. Go also
has types that have specific length including rune , int8 , int16 , int32 , int64 , byte ,
uint8 , uint16 , uint32 , uint64 . Note that rune is alias of int32 and byte is alias of
uint8 .

One important thing you should know that you cannot assign values between these types,
this operation will cause compile errors.

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var a int8
var b int32
c := a + b

Although int32 has a longer length than int8, and has the same type as int, you cannot
assign values between them. ( c will be asserted as type int here )
Float types have the float32 and float64 types and no type called float . The latter one
is the default type if using brief statement.
That's all? No! Go supports complex numbers as well. complex128 (with a 64-bit real and
64-bit imaginary part) is the default type, if you need a smaller type, there is one called
complex64 (with a 32-bit real and 32-bit imaginary part). Its form is RE+IMi , where RE is

real part and IM is imaginary part, the last i is the imaginary number. There is a example
of complex number.
var c complex64 = 5+5i
//output: (5+5i)
fmt.Printf("Value is: %v", c)

String
We just talked about how Go uses the UTF-8 character set. Strings are represented by
double quotes "" or backticks `` .
// sample code
var frenchHello string // basic form to define string
var emptyString string = "" // define a string with empty string
func test() {
no, yes, maybe := "no", "yes", "maybe" // brief statement
japaneseHello := "Ohaiou"
frenchHello = "Bonjour" // basic form of assign values
}

It's impossible to change string values by index. You will get errors when you compile the
following code.
var s string = "hello"
s[0] = 'c'

What if I really want to change just one character in a string? Try the following code.

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s := "hello"
c := []byte(s) // convert string to []byte type
c[0] = 'c'
s2 := string(c) // convert back to string type
fmt.Printf("%s\n", s2)

You use the + operator to combine two strings.

s := "hello,"
m := " world"
a := s + m
fmt.Printf("%s\n", a)

and also.
s := "hello"
s = "c" + s[1:] // you cannot change string values by index, but you can get values instead.
fmt.Printf("%s\n", s)

What if I want to have a multiple-line string?

m := `hello
world`

` will not escape any characters in a string.

Error types
Go has one error type for purpose of dealing with error messages. There is also a
package called errors to handle errors.
err := errors.New("emit macho dwarf: elf header corrupted")
if err != nil {
fmt.Print(err)
}

Underlying data structure

The following picture comes from an article about Go data structure in Russ Cox's Blog. As
you can see, Go utilizes blocks of memory to store data.

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Figure 2.1 Go underlying data structure

Some skills
Define by group
If you want to define multiple constants, variables or import packages, you can use the
group form.
Basic form.
import "fmt"
import "os"
const i = 100
const pi = 3.1415
const prefix = "Go_"
var i int
var pi float32
var prefix string

Group form.
import(
"fmt"
"os"
)
const(
i = 100
pi = 3.1415
prefix = "Go_"
)
var(
i int
pi float32
prefix string
)

Unless you assign the value of constant is iota , the first value of constant in the group
const() will be 0 . If following constants don't assign values explicitly, their values will be

the same as the last one. If the value of last constant is iota , the values of following
constants which are not assigned are iota also.

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iota enumerate
Go has one keyword called iota , this keyword is to make enum , it begins with 0 ,
increased by 1 .
const(
x = iota // x == 0
y = iota // y == 1
z = iota // z == 2
w // If there is no expression after the constants name, it uses the last expression,

//so it's saying w = iota implicitly. Therefore w == 3, and y and z both can omit "= iota" as wel
)
const v = iota // once iota meets keyword `const`, it resets to `0`, so v = 0.
const (
e, f, g = iota, iota, iota // e=0,f=0,g=0 values of iota are same in one line.
)

Some rules
The reason that Go is concise because it has some default behaviors.
Any variable that begins with a capital letter means it will be exported, private otherwise.
The same rule applies for functions and constants, no public or private keyword
exists in Go.

array, slice, map

array
array is an array obviously, we define one as follows.

var arr [n]type

in [n]type , n is the length of the array, type is the type of its elements. Like other
languages, we use [] to get or set element values within arrays.

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var arr [10]int // an array of type [10]int

arr[0] = 42 // array is 0-based
arr[1] = 13 // assign value to element
fmt.Printf("The first element is %d\n", arr[0])
// get element value, it returns 42
fmt.Printf("The last element is %d\n", arr[9])
//it returns default value of 10th element in this array, which is 0 in this case.

Because length is a part of the array type, [3]int and [4]int are different types, so we
cannot change the length of arrays. When you use arrays as arguments, functions get their
copies instead of references! If you want to use references, you may want to use slice .
We'll talk about later.
It's possible to use := when you define arrays.
a := [3]int{1, 2, 3} // define an int array with 3 elements
b := [10]int{1, 2, 3}
// define a int array with 10 elements, of which the first three are assigned.
//The rest of them use the default value 0.
c := [...]int{4, 5, 6} // use `` to replace the length parameter and Go will calculate it for you.

You may want to use arrays as arrays' elements. Let's see how to do this.
// define a two-dimensional array with 2 elements, and each element has 4 elements.
doubleArray := [2][4]int{[4]int{1, 2, 3, 4}, [4]int{5, 6, 7, 8}}
// The declaration can be written more concisely as follows.
easyArray := [2][4]int{{1, 2, 3, 4}, {5, 6, 7, 8}}

Array underlying data structure.

Figure 2.2 Multidimensional array mapping relationship

slice
In many situations, the array type is not a good choice -for instance when we don't know
how long the array will be when we define it. Thus, we need a "dynamic array". This is called
slice in Go.
slice is not really a dynamic array . It's a reference type. slice points to an underlying
array whose declaration is similar to array , but doesn't need length.

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// just like defining an array, but this time, we exclude the length.
var fslice []int

Then we define a slice , and initialize its data.

slice := []byte {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd'}

slice can redefine existing slices or arrays. slice uses array[i:j] to slice, where i is

the start index and j is end index, but notice that array[j] will not be sliced since the
length of the slice is j-i .
// define an array with 10 elements whose types are bytes
var ar = [10]byte {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j'}
// define two slices with type []byte
var a, b []byte
// 'a' points to elements from 3rd to 5th in array ar.
a = ar[2:5]
// now 'a' has elements ar[2],ar[3] and ar[4]
// 'b' is another slice of array ar
b = ar[3:5]
// now 'b' has elements ar[3] and ar[4]

Notice the differences between slice and array when you define them. We use [] to
let Go calculate length but use [] to define slice only.
Their underlying data structure.

Figure 2.3 Correspondence between slice and array

slice has some convenient operations.
slice is 0-based, ar[:n] equals to ar[0:n]

The second index will be the length of slice if omitted, ar[n:] equals to
ar[n:len(ar)] .

You can use ar[:] to slice whole array, reasons are explained in first two statements.
More examples pertaining to slice

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// define an array
var array = [10]byte{'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j'}
// define two slices
var aSlice, bSlice []byte
// some convenient operations
aSlice = array[:3] // equals to aSlice = array[0:3] aSlice has elements a,b,c
aSlice = array[5:] // equals to aSlice = array[5:10] aSlice has elements f,g,h,i,j
aSlice = array[:] // equals to aSlice = array[0:10] aSlice has all elements
// slice from slice
aSlice = array[3:7] // aSlice has elements d,e,f,glen=4cap=7
bSlice = aSlice[1:3] // bSlice contains aSlice[1], aSlice[2], so it has elements e,f
bSlice = aSlice[:3] // bSlice contains aSlice[0], aSlice[1], aSlice[2], so it has d,e,f
bSlice = aSlice[0:5] // slice could be expanded in range of cap, now bSlice contains d,e,f,g,h
bSlice = aSlice[:] // bSlice has same elements as aSlice does, which are d,e,f,g

slice is a reference type, so any changes will affect other variables pointing to the same

slice or array. For instance, in the case of aSlice and bSlice above, if you change the
value of an element in aSlice , bSlice will be changed as well.
slice is like a struct by definition and it contains 3 parts.

A pointer that points to where slice starts.

The length of slice .
Capacity, the length from start index to end index of slice .
Array_a := [10]byte{'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j'}
Slice_a := Array_a[2:5]

The underlying data structure of the code above as follows.

Figure 2.4 Array information of slice

There are some built-in functions for slice.
len gets the length of slice .
cap gets the maximum length of slice
append appends one or more elements to slice , and returns slice .
copy copies elements from one slice to the other, and returns the number of elements

that were copied.

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Attention: append will change the array that slice points to, and affect other slices that
point to the same array. Also, if there is not enough length for the slice ( (cap-len) == 0 ),
append returns a new array for this slice. When this happens, other slices pointing to the old

array will not be affected.

map
map behaves like a dictionary in Python. Use the form map[keyType]valueType to define it.

Let's see some code. The 'set' and 'get' values in map are similar to slice , however the
index in slice can only be of type 'int' while map can use much more than that: for
example int , string , or whatever you want. Also, they are all able to use == and != to
compare values.
// use string as the key type, int as the value type, and `make` initialize it.
var numbers map[string] int
// another way to define map
numbers := make(map[string]int)
numbers["one"] = 1 // assign value by key
numbers["ten"] = 10
numbers["three"] = 3
fmt.Println("The third number is: ", numbers["three"]) // get values
// It prints: The third number is: 3

Some notes when you use map.

map is disorderly. Everytime you print map you will get different results. It's impossible

to get values by index -you have to use key .

map doesn't have a fixed length. It's a reference type just like slice .
len works for map also. It returns how many key s that map has.

It's quite easy to change the value through map . Simply use numbers["one"]=11 to
change the value of key one to 11 .
You can use form key:val to initialize map's values, and map has built-in methods to
check if the key exists.
Use delete to delete an element in map .

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// Initialize a map
rating := map[string]float32 {"C":5, "Go":4.5, "Python":4.5, "C++":2 }
// map has two return values. For the second return value, if the key doesn't
//exist'ok' returns false. It returns true otherwise.
csharpRating, ok := rating["C#"]
if ok {
fmt.Println("C# is in the map and its rating is ", csharpRating)
} else {
fmt.Println("We have no rating associated with C# in the map")
}
delete(rating, "C") // delete element with key "c"

As I said above, map is a reference type. If two map s point to same underlying data, any
change will affect both of them.
m := make(map[string]string)
m["Hello"] = "Bonjour"
m1 := m
m1["Hello"] = "Salut" // now the value of m["hello"] is Salut

make, new
make does memory allocation for built-in models, such as map , slice , and channel ,

while new is for types' memory allocation.

new(T) allocates zero-value to type T 's memory, returns its memory address, which is the

value of type *T . By Go's definition, it returns a pointer which points to type T 's zerovalue.
new returns pointers.

The built-in function make(T, args) has different purposes than new(T) . make can be
used for slice , map , and channel , and returns a type T with an initial value. The reason
for doing this is because the underlying data of these three types must be initialized before
they point to them. For example, a slice contains a pointer that points to the underlying
array , length and capacity. Before these data are initialized, slice is nil , so for slice ,
map and channel , make initializes their underlying data and assigns some suitable values.
make returns non-zero values.

The following picture shows how new and make are different.

Figure 2.5 Underlying memory allocation of make and new

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Zero-value does not mean empty value. It's the value that variables default to in most cases.
Here is a list of some zero-values.
int 0
int8 0
int32 0
int64 0
uint 0x0
rune 0 // the actual type of rune is int32
byte 0x0 // the actual type of byte is uint8
float32 0 // length is 4 byte
float64 0 //length is 8 byte
bool false
string ""

Links
Directory
Previous section: "Hello, Go"
Next section: Control statements and functions

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2.3 Control statements and functions

In this section, we are going to talk about control statements and function operations in Go.

Control statement
The greatest invention in programming is flow control. Because of them, you are able to use
simple control statements that can be used to represent complex logic. There are three
categories of flow control: conditional, cycle control and unconditional jump.

if
if will most likely be the most common keyword in your programs. If it meets the

conditions, then it does something and it does something else if not.

if doesn't need parentheses in Go.

if x > 10 {
fmt.Println("x is greater than 10")
} else {
fmt.Println("x is less than or equal to 10")
}

The most useful thing concerning if in Go is that it can have one initialization statement
before the conditional statement. The scope of the variables defined in this initialization
statement are only available inside the block of the defining if .
// initialize x, then check if x greater than
if x := computedValue(); x > 10 {
fmt.Println("x is greater than 10")
} else {
fmt.Println("x is less than 10")
}
// the following code will not compile
fmt.Println(x)

Use if-else for multiple conditions.

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if integer == 3 {
fmt.Println("The integer is equal to 3")
} else if integer < 3 {
fmt.Println("The integer is less than 3")
} else {
fmt.Println("The integer is greater than 3")
}

goto
Go has a goto keyword, but be careful when you use it. goto reroutes the control flow to
a previously defined label within the body of same code block.
func myFunc() {
i := 0
Here: // label ends with ":"
fmt.Println(i)
i++
goto Here // jump to label "Here"
}

The label name is case sensitive.

for
for is the most powerful control logic in Go. It can read data in loops and iterative

operations, just like while .

for expression1; expression2; expression3 {
//...
}

expression1 , expression2 and expression3 are all expressions, where expression1 and
expression3 are variable definitions or return values from functions, and expression2 is a

conditional statement. expression1 will be executed once before looping, and expression3
will be executed after each loop.
Examples are more useful than words.

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package main
import "fmt"
func main(){
sum := 0;
for index:=0; index < 10 ; index++ {
sum += index
}
fmt.Println("sum is equal to ", sum)
}
// Printsum is equal to 45

Sometimes we need multiple assignments, but Go doesn't have the , operator, so we use
parallel assignment like i, j = i + 1, j - 1 .
We can omit expression1 and expression3 if they are not necessary.
sum := 1
for ; sum < 1000; {
sum += sum
}

Omit ; as well. Feel familiar? Yes, it's identical to while .

sum := 1
for sum < 1000 {
sum += sum
}

There are two important operations in loops which are break and continue . break jumps
out of the loop, and continue skips the current loop and starts the next one. If you have
nested loops, use break along with labels.
for index := 10; index>0; index-- {
if index == 5{
break // or continue
}
fmt.Println(index)
}
// break prints 109876
// continue prints 1098764321

for can read data from slice and map when it is used together with range .

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for k,v:=range map {

fmt.Println("map's key:",k)
fmt.Println("map's val:",v)
}

Because Go supports multi-value returns and gives compile errors when you don't use
values that were defined, you may want to use _ to discard certain return values.
for _, v := range map{
fmt.Println("map's val:", v)
}

switch
Sometimes you may find that you are using too many if-else statements to implement
some logic, which may make it difficult to read and maintain in the future. This is the perfect
time to use the switch statement to solve this problem.
switch sExpr {
case expr1:
some instructions
case expr2:
some other instructions
case expr3:
some other instructions
default:
other code
}

The type of sExpr , expr1 , expr2 , and expr3 must be the same. switch is very flexible.
Conditions don't have to be constants and it executes from top to bottom until it matches
conditions. If there is no statement after the keyword switch , then it matches true .
i := 10
switch i {
case 1:
fmt.Println("i is equal to 1")
case 2, 3, 4:
fmt.Println("i is equal to 2, 3 or 4")
case 10:
fmt.Println("i is equal to 10")
default:
fmt.Println("All I know is that i is an integer")
}

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In the fifth line, we put many values in one case , and we don't need to add the break
keyword at the end of case 's body. It will jump out of the switch body once it matched any
case. If you want to continue to matching more cases, you need to use the fallthrough
statement.
integer := 6
switch integer {
case 4:
fmt.Println("integer <= 4")
fallthrough
case 5:
fmt.Println("integer <= 5")
fallthrough
case 6:
fmt.Println("integer <= 6")
fallthrough
case 7:
fmt.Println("integer <= 7")
fallthrough
case 8:
fmt.Println("integer <= 8")
fallthrough
default:
fmt.Println("default case")
}

This program prints the following information.

integer <= 6
integer <= 7
integer <= 8
default case

Functions
Use the func keyword to define a function.
func funcName(input1 type1, input2 type2) (output1 type1, output2 type2) {
// function body
// multi-value return
return value1, value2
}

We can extrapolate the following information from the example above.

Use keyword func to define a function funcName .
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Functions have zero, one or more than one arguments. The argument type comes after
the argument name and arguments are separated by , .
Functions can return multiple values.
There are two return values named output1 and output2 , you can omit their names
and use their type only.
If there is only one return value and you omitted the name, you don't need brackets for
the return values.
If the function doesn't have return values, you can omit the return parameters
altogether.
If the function has return values, you have to use the return statement somewhere in
the body of the function.
Let's see one practical example. (calculate maximum value)
package main
import "fmt"
// return greater value between a and b
func max(a, b int) int {
if a > b {
return a
}
return b
}
func main() {
x := 3
y := 4
z := 5
max_xy := max(x, y) // call function max(x, y)
max_xz := max(x, z) // call function max(x, z)
fmt.Printf("max(%d, %d) = %d\n", x, y, max_xy)
fmt.Printf("max(%d, %d) = %d\n", x, z, max_xz)
fmt.Printf("max(%d, %d) = %d\n", y, z, max(y,z)) // call function here
}

In the above example, there are two arguments in the function max , their types are both
int so the first type can be omitted. For instance, a, b int instead of a int, b int . The

same rules apply for additional arguments. Notice here that max only has one return value,
so we only need to write the type of its return value -this is the short form of writing it.

Multi-value return
One thing that Go is better at than C is that it supports multi-value returns.

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We'll use the following example here.

package main
import "fmt"
// return results of A + B and A * B
func SumAndProduct(A, B int) (int, int) {
return A+B, A*B
}
func main() {
x := 3
y := 4
xPLUSy, xTIMESy := SumAndProduct(x, y)
fmt.Printf("%d + %d = %d\n", x, y, xPLUSy)
fmt.Printf("%d * %d = %d\n", x, y, xTIMESy)
}

The above example returns two values without names -you have the option of naming them
also. If we named the return values, we would just need to use return to return the values
since they are initialized in the function automatically. Notice that if your functions are going
to be used outside of the package, which means your function names start with a capital
letter, you'd better write complete statements for return ; it makes your code more
readable.
func SumAndProduct(A, B int) (add int, multiplied int) {
add = A+B
multiplied = A*B
return
}

Variadic functions
Go supports functions with a variable number of arguments. These functions are called
"variadic", which means the function allows an uncertain numbers of arguments.
func myfunc(arg ...int) {}

arg int tells Go that this is a function that has variable arguments. Notice that these

arguments are type int . In the body of function, the arg becomes a slice of int .

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for _, n := range arg {

fmt.Printf("And the number is: %d\n", n)
}

Pass by value and pointers

When we pass an argument to the function that was called, that function actually gets the
copy of our variables so any change will not affect to the original variable.
Let's see one example in order to prove what i'm saying.
package main
import "fmt"
// simple function to add 1 to a
func add1(a int) int {
a = a+1 // we change value of a
return a // return new value of a
}
func main() {
x := 3
fmt.Println("x = ", x) // should print "x = 3"
x1 := add1(x) // call add1(x)
fmt.Println("x+1 = ", x1) // should print "x+1 = 4"
fmt.Println("x = ", x) // should print "x = 3"
}

Can you see that? Even though we called add1 with x , the origin value of x doesn't
change.
The reason is very simple: when we called add1 , we gave a copy of x to it, not the x
itself.
Now you may ask how I can pass the real x to the function.
We need use pointers here. We know variables are stored in memory and they have some
memory addresses. So, if we want to change the value of a variable, we must change its
memory address. Therefore the function add1 has to know the memory address of x in
order to change its value. Here we pass &x to the function, and change the argument's
type to the pointer type *int . Be aware that we pass a copy of the pointer, not copy of
value.

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package main
import "fmt"
// simple function to add 1 to a
func add1(a *int) int {
*a = *a+1 // we changed value of a
return *a // return new value of a
}
func main() {
x := 3
fmt.Println("x = ", x) // should print "x = 3"
x1 := add1(&x) // call add1(&x) pass memory address of x
fmt.Println("x+1 = ", x1) // should print "x+1 = 4"
fmt.Println("x = ", x) // should print "x = 4"
}

Now we can change the value of x in the functions. Why do we use pointers? What are the
advantages?
Allows us to use more functions to operate on one variable.
Low cost by passing memory addresses (8 bytes), copy is not an efficient way, both in
terms of time and space, to pass variables.
string , slice and map are reference types, so they use pointers when passing to

functions by default. (Attention: If you need to change the length of slice , you have to
pass pointers explicitly)

defer
Go has a well designed keyword called defer . You can have many defer statements in
one function; they will execute in reverse order when the program executes to the end of
functions. In the case where the program opens some resource files, these files would have
to be closed before the function can return with errors. Let's see some examples.

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func ReadWrite() bool {

file.Open("file")
// Do some work
if failureX {
file.Close()
return false
}
if failureY {
file.Close()
return false
}
file.Close()
return true
}

We saw some code being repeated several times. defer solves this problem very well. It
doesn't only help you to write clean code but also makes your code more readable.
func ReadWrite() bool {
file.Open("file")
defer file.Close()
if failureX {
return false
}
if failureY {
return false
}
return true
}

If there are more than one defer s, they will execute by reverse order. The following
example will print 4 3 2 1 0 .
for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
defer fmt.Printf("%d ", i)
}

Functions as values and types

Functions are also variables in Go, we can use type to define them. Functions that have
the same signature can be seen as the same type.
type typeName func(input1 inputType1 , input2 inputType2 [, ...]) (result1 resultType1 [, ...])

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What's the advantage of this feature? The answer is that it allows us to pass functions as
values.
package main
import "fmt"
type testInt func(int) bool // define a function type of variable
func isOdd(integer int) bool {
if integer%2 == 0 {
return false
}
return true
}
func isEven(integer int) bool {
if integer%2 == 0 {
return true
}
return false
}
// pass the function `f` as an argument to another function
func filter(slice []int, f testInt) []int {
var result []int
for _, value := range slice {
if f(value) {
result = append(result, value)
}
}
return result
}
func main(){
slice := []int {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7}
fmt.Println("slice = ", slice)
odd := filter(slice, isOdd) // use function as values
fmt.Println("Odd elements of slice are: ", odd)
even := filter(slice, isEven)
fmt.Println("Even elements of slice are: ", even)
}

It's very useful when we use interfaces. As you can see testInt is a variable that has a
function as type and the returned values and arguments of filter are the same as those
of testInt . Therefore, we can have complex logic in our programs, while maintaining
flexibility in our code.

Panic and Recover

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Go doesn't have try-catch structure like Java does. Instead of throwing exceptions, Go
uses panic and recover to deal with errors. However, you shouldn't use panic very
much, although it's powerful.
Panic is a built-in function to break the normal flow of programs and get into panic status.

When a function F calls panic , F will not continue executing but its defer functions will
continue to execute. Then F goes back to the break point which caused the panic status.
The program will not terminate until all of these functions return with panic to the first level of
that goroutine . panic can be produced by calling panic in the program, and some errors
also cause panic like array access out of bounds errors.
Recover is a built-in function to recover goroutine s from panic status. Calling recover in
defer functions is useful because normal functions will not be executed when the program

is in the panic status. It catches panic values if the program is in the panic status, and it
gets nil if the program is not in panic status.
The following example shows how to use panic .
var user = os.Getenv("USER")
func init() {
if user == "" {
panic("no value for $USER")
}
}

The following example shows how to check panic .

func throwsPanic(f func()) (b bool) {
defer func() {
if x := recover(); x != nil {
b = true
}
}()
f() // if f causes panic, it will recover
return
}

main function and init function

Go has two retentions which are called main and init , where init can be used in all
packages and main can only be used in the main package. These two functions are not
able to have arguments or return values. Even though we can write many init functions in
one package, I strongly recommend writing only one init function for each package.

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Go programs will call init() and main() automatically, so you don't need to call them by
yourself. For every package, the init function is optional, but package main has one and
only one main function.
Programs initialize and begin execution from the main package. If the main package
imports other packages, they will be imported in the compile time. If one package is imported
many times, it will be only compiled once. After importing packages, programs will initialize
the constants and variables within the imported packages, then execute the init function if
it exists, and so on. After all the other packages are initialized, programs will initialize
constants and variables in the main package, then execute the init function inside the
package if it exists. The following figure shows the process.

Figure 2.6 Flow of programs initialization in Go

import
We use import very often in Go programs as follows.
import(
"fmt"
)

Then we use functions in that package as follows.

fmt.Println("hello world")

fmt is from Go standard library, it is located within $GOROOT/pkg. Go supports third-party

packages in two ways.

1. Relative path import "./model" // load package in the same directory, I don't recommend
this way.
2. Absolute path import "shorturl/model" // load package in path
"$GOPATH/pkg/shorturl/model"
There are some special operators when we import packages, and beginners are always
confused by these operators.
1. Dot operator. Sometime we see people use following way to import packages.
import(
. "fmt"
)

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The dot operator means you can omit the package name when you call functions inside
of that package. Now fmt.Printf("Hello world") becomes to Printf("Hello world") .
2. Alias operation. It changes the name of the package that we imported when we call
functions that belong to that package.
import(
f "fmt"
)

Now fmt.Printf("Hello world") becomes to f.Printf("Hello world") .

3.

_ operator. This is the operator that is difficult to understand without someone

explaining it to you.
import (
"database/sql"
_ "github.com/ziutek/mymysql/godrv"
)

The _ operator actually means we just want to import that package and execute its
init function, and we are not sure if want to use the functions belonging to that

package.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Go foundation
Next section: struct

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2.4 struct
struct
We can define new types of containers of other properties or fields in Go just like in other
programming languages. For example, we can create a type called person to represent a
person, with fields name and age. We call this kind of type a struct .
type person struct {
name string
age int
}

Look how easy it is to define a struct !

There are two fields.
name is a string used to store a person's name.
age is a int used to store a person's age.

Let's see how to use it.

type person struct {
name string
age int
}
var P person // p is person type
P.name = "Astaxie" // assign "Astaxie" to the field 'name' of p
P.age = 25 // assign 25 to field 'age' of p
fmt.Printf("The person's name is %s\n", P.name) // access field 'name' of p

There are three more ways to define a struct.

Assign initial values by order
P := person{"Tom", 25}

Use the format field:value to initialize the struct without order

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P := person{age:24, name:"Bob"}

Define an anonymous struct, then initialize it

P := struct{name string; age int}{"Amy",18}

Let's see a complete example.

package main
import "fmt"
// define a new type
type person struct {
name string
age int
}
// compare the age of two people, then return the older person and differences of age
// struct is passed by value
func Older(p1, p2 person) (person, int) {
if p1.age>p2.age {
return p1, p1.age-p2.age
}
return p2, p2.age-p1.age
}
func main() {
var tom person
// initialization
tom.name, tom.age = "Tom", 18
// initialize two values by format "field:value"
bob := person{age:25, name:"Bob"}
// initialize two values with order
paul := person{"Paul", 43}
tb_Older, tb_diff := Older(tom, bob)
tp_Older, tp_diff := Older(tom, paul)
bp_Older, bp_diff := Older(bob, paul)

fmt.Printf("Of %s and %s, %s is older by %d years\n", tom.name, bob.name, tb_Older.name, tb_diff)

fmt.Printf("Of %s and %s, %s is older by %d years\n", tom.name, paul.name, tp_Older.name, tp_diff

fmt.Printf("Of %s and %s, %s is older by %d years\n", bob.name, paul.name, bp_Older.name, bp_diff

}

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embedded fields in struct

I've just introduced to you how to define a struct with field names and type. In fact, Go
supports fields without names, but with types. We call these embedded fields.
When the embedded field is a struct, all the fields in that struct will implicitly be the fields in
the struct in which it has been embdedded.
Let's see one example.
package main
import "fmt"
type Human struct {
name string
age int
weight int
}
type Student struct {
Human // embedded field, it means Student struct includes all fields that Human has.
specialty string
}
func main() {
// initialize a student
mark := Student{Human{"Mark", 25, 120}, "Computer Science"}
// access fields
fmt.Println("His name is ", mark.name)
fmt.Println("His age is ", mark.age)
fmt.Println("His weight is ", mark.weight)
fmt.Println("His specialty is ", mark.specialty)
// modify notes
mark.specialty = "AI"
fmt.Println("Mark changed his specialty")
fmt.Println("His specialty is ", mark.specialty)
// modify age
fmt.Println("Mark become old")
mark.age = 46
fmt.Println("His age is", mark.age)
// modify weight
fmt.Println("Mark is not an athlet anymore")
mark.weight += 60
fmt.Println("His weight is", mark.weight)
}

Figure 2.7 Embedding in Student and Human

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We see that we can access the age and name fields in Student just like we can in Human.
This is how embedded fields work. It's very cool, isn't it? Hold on, there's something cooler!
You can even use Student to access Human in this embedded field!
mark.Human = Human{"Marcus", 55, 220}
mark.Human.age -= 1

All the types in Go can be used as embedded fields.

package main
import "fmt"
type Skills []string
type Human struct {
name string
age int
weight int
}
type Student struct {
Human // struct as embedded field
Skills // string slice as embedded field
int // built-in type as embedded field
specialty string
}
func main() {
// initialize Student Jane
jane := Student{Human:Human{"Jane", 35, 100}, specialty:"Biology"}
// access fields
fmt.Println("Her name is ", jane.name)
fmt.Println("Her age is ", jane.age)
fmt.Println("Her weight is ", jane.weight)
fmt.Println("Her specialty is ", jane.specialty)
// modify value of skill field
jane.Skills = []string{"anatomy"}
fmt.Println("Her skills are ", jane.Skills)
fmt.Println("She acquired two new ones ")
jane.Skills = append(jane.Skills, "physics", "golang")
fmt.Println("Her skills now are ", jane.Skills)
// modify embedded field
jane.int = 3
fmt.Println("Her preferred number is ", jane.int)
}

In the above example, we can see that all types can be embedded fields and we can use
functions to operate on them.

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There is one more problem however. If Human has a field called phone and Student has a
field with same name, what should we do?
Go use a very simple way to solve it. The outer fields get upper access levels, which means
when you access student.phone , we will get the field called phone in student, not the one in
the Human struct. This feature can be simply seen as field overload ing.
package main
import "fmt"
type Human struct {
name string
age int
phone string // Human has phone field
}
type Employee struct {
Human // embedded field Human
specialty string
phone string // phone in employee
}
func main() {
Bob := Employee{Human{"Bob", 34, "777-444-XXXX"}, "Designer", "333-222"}
fmt.Println("Bob's work phone is:", Bob.phone)
// access phone field in Human
fmt.Println("Bob's personal phone is:", Bob.Human.phone)
}

Links
Directory
Previous section: Control statements and functions
Next section: Object-oriented

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Object-oriented
We talked about functions and structs in the last two sections, but did you ever consider
using functions as fields of a struct? In this section, I will introduce you to another form of
function that has a receiver, which is called method .

method
Suppose you define a "rectangle" struct and you want to calculate its area. We'd typically
use the following code to achieve this goal.
package main
import "fmt"
type Rectangle struct {
width, height float64
}
func area(r Rectangle) float64 {
return r.width*r.height
}
func main() {
r1 := Rectangle{12, 2}
r2 := Rectangle{9, 4}
fmt.Println("Area of r1 is: ", area(r1))
fmt.Println("Area of r2 is: ", area(r2))
}

The above example can calculate a rectangle's area. We use the function called area , but
it's not a method of the rectangle struct (like class methods in classic object-oriented
languages). The function and struct are two independent things as you may notice.
It's not a problem so far. However, if you also have to calculate the area of a circle, square,
pentagon, or any other kind of shape, you are going to need to add additional functions with
very similar names.

Figure 2.8 Relationship between function and struct

Obviously that's not cool. Also, the area should really be the property of a circle or rectangle.

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For those reasons, we have the method concept. method is affiliated with type. It has the
same syntax as functions do except for an additional parameter after the func keyword
called the receiver , which is the main body of that method.
Using the same example, Rectangle.area() belongs directly to rectangle, instead of as a
peripheral function. More specifically, length , width and area() all belong to rectangle.
As Rob Pike said.
"A method is a function with an implicit first argument, called a receiver."

Syntax of method.
func (r ReceiverType) funcName(parameters) (results)

Let's change our example using method instead.

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package main
import (
"fmt"
"math"
)
type Rectangle struct {
width, height float64
}
type Circle struct {
radius float64
}
func (r Rectangle) area() float64 {
return r.width*r.height
}
func (c Circle) area() float64 {
return c.radius * c.radius * math.Pi
}
func main() {
r1 := Rectangle{12, 2}
r2 := Rectangle{9, 4}
c1 := Circle{10}
c2 := Circle{25}
fmt.Println("Area of r1 is: ", r1.area())
fmt.Println("Area of r2 is: ", r2.area())
fmt.Println("Area of c1 is: ", c1.area())
fmt.Println("Area of c2 is: ", c2.area())
}

Notes for using methods.

If the name of methods are the same but they don't share the same receivers, they are
not the same.
Methods are able to access fields within receivers.
Use . to call a method in the struct, the same way fields are called.

Figure 2.9 Methods are different in different structs

In the example above, the area() methods belong to both Rectangle and Circle respectively,
so the receivers are Rectangle and Circle.

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One thing that's worth noting is that the method with a dotted line means the receiver is
passed by value, not by reference. The difference between them is that a method can
change its receiver's values when the receiver is passed by reference, and it gets a copy of
the receiver when the receiver is passed by value.
Can the receiver only be a struct? Of course not. Any type can be the receiver of a method.
You may be confused about customized types. Struct is a special kind of customized type there are more customized types.
Use the following format to define a customized type.
type typeName typeLiteral

Examples of customized types:

type ages int
type money float32
type months map[string]int
m := months {
"January":31,
"February":28,
...
"December":31,
}

I hope that you know how to use customized types now. Similar to typedef in C, we use
ages to substitute int in the above example.

Let's get back to talking about method .

You can use as many methods in custom types as you want.
package main
import "fmt"
const(
WHITE = iota
BLACK
BLUE
RED
YELLOW
)
type Color byte

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type Box struct {

width, height, depth float64
color Color
}
type BoxList []Box //a slice of boxes
func (b Box) Volume() float64 {
return b.width * b.height * b.depth
}
func (b *Box) SetColor(c Color) {
b.color = c
}
func (bl BoxList) BiggestsColor() Color {
v := 0.00
k := Color(WHITE)
for _, b := range bl {
if b.Volume() > v {
v = b.Volume()
k = b.color
}
}
return k
}
func (bl BoxList) PaintItBlack() {
for i, _ := range bl {
bl[i].SetColor(BLACK)
}
}
func (c Color) String() string {
strings := []string {"WHITE", "BLACK", "BLUE", "RED", "YELLOW"}
return strings[c]
}
func main() {
boxes := BoxList {
Box{4, 4, 4, RED},
Box{10, 10, 1, YELLOW},
Box{1, 1, 20, BLACK},
Box{10, 10, 1, BLUE},
Box{10, 30, 1, WHITE},
Box{20, 20, 20, YELLOW},
}
fmt.Printf("We have %d boxes in our set\n", len(boxes))
fmt.Println("The volume of the first one is", boxes[0].Volume(), "cm")
fmt.Println("The color of the last one is",boxes[len(boxes)-1].color.String())
fmt.Println("The biggest one is", boxes.BiggestsColor().String())

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fmt.Println("Let's paint them all black")

boxes.PaintItBlack()
fmt.Println("The color of the second one is", boxes[1].color.String())
fmt.Println("Obviously, now, the biggest one is", boxes.BiggestsColor().String())
}

We define some constants and customized types.

Use Color as alias of byte .
Define a struct Box which has fields height, width, length and color.
Define a struct BoxList which has Box as its field.
Then we defined some methods for our customized types.
Volume() uses Box as its receiver and returns the volume of Box.
SetColor(c Color) changes Box's color.
BiggestsColor() returns the color which has the biggest volume.
PaintItBlack() sets color for all Box in BoxList to black.
String() use Color as its receiver, returns the string format of color name.
Is it much clearer when we use words to describe our requirements? We often write our
requirements before we start coding.

Use pointer as receiver

Let's take a look at SetColor method. Its receiver is a pointer of Box. Yes, you can use
*Box as a receiver. Why do we use a pointer here? Because we want to change Box's color

in this method. Thus, if we don't use a pointer, it will only change the value inside a copy of
Box.
If we see that a receiver is the first argument of a method, it's not hard to understand how it
works.
You might be asking why we aren't using (*b).Color=c instead of b.Color=c in the
SetColor() method. Either one is OK here because Go knows how to interpret the
assignment. Do you think Go is more fascinating now?
You may also be asking whether we should use (&bl[i]).SetColor(BLACK) in PaintItBlack
because we pass a pointer to SetColor . Again, either one is OK because Go knows how to
interpret it!

Inheritance of method

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We learned about inheritance of fields in the last section. Similarly, we also have method
inheritance in Go. If an anonymous field has methods, then the struct that contains the field
will have all the methods from it as well.
package main
import "fmt"
type Human struct {
name string
age int
phone string
}
type Student struct {
Human // anonymous field
school string
}
type Employee struct {
Human
company string
}
// define a method in Human
func (h *Human) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s you can call me on %s\n", h.name, h.phone)
}
func main() {
mark := Student{Human{"Mark", 25, "222-222-YYYY"}, "MIT"}
sam := Employee{Human{"Sam", 45, "111-888-XXXX"}, "Golang Inc"}
mark.SayHi()
sam.SayHi()
}

Method overload
If we want Employee to have its own method SayHi , we can define a method that has the
same name in Employee, and it will hide SayHi in Human when we call it.

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package main
import "fmt"
type Human struct {
name string
age int
phone string
}
type Student struct {
Human
school string
}
type Employee struct {
Human
company string
}
func (h *Human) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s you can call me on %s\n", h.name, h.phone)
}
func (e *Employee) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s, I work at %s. Call me on %s\n", e.name,
e.company, e.phone) //Yes you can split into 2 lines here.
}
func main() {
mark := Student{Human{"Mark", 25, "222-222-YYYY"}, "MIT"}
sam := Employee{Human{"Sam", 45, "111-888-XXXX"}, "Golang Inc"}
mark.SayHi()
sam.SayHi()
}

You are able to write an Object-oriented program now, and methods use rule of capital letter
to decide whether public or private as well.

Links
Directory
Previous section: struct
Next section: interface

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2.6 Interface
Interface
One of the subtlest design features in Go are interfaces. After reading this section, you will
likely be impressed by their implementation.

What is an interface
In short, an interface is a set of methods that we use to define a set of actions.
Like the examples in previous sections, both Student and Employee can SayHi() , but they
don't do the same thing.
Let's do some more work. We'll add one more method Sing() to them, along with the
BorrowMoney() method to Student and the SpendSalary() method to Employee.

Now, Student has three methods called SayHi() , Sing() and BorrowMoney() , and
Employee has SayHi() , Sing() and SpendSalary() .
This combination of methods is called an interface and is implemented by both Student and
Employee. So, Student and Employee implement the interface: SayHi() and Sing() . At
the same time, Employee doesn't implement the interface: SayHi() , Sing() ,
BorrowMoney() , and Student doesn't implement the interface: SayHi() , Sing() ,
SpendSalary() . This is because Employee doesn't have the method BorrowMoney() and

Student doesn't have the method SpendSalary() .

Type of Interface
An interface defines a set of methods, so if a type implements all the methods we say that it
implements the interface.
type Human struct {
name string
age int
phone string
}
type Student struct {
Human
school string
loan float32

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}
type Employee struct {
Human
company string
money float32
}
func (h *Human) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s you can call me on %s\n", h.name, h.phone)
}
func (h *Human) Sing(lyrics string) {
fmt.Println("La la, la la la, la la la la la...", lyrics)
}
func (h *Human) Guzzle(beerStein string) {
fmt.Println("Guzzle Guzzle Guzzle...", beerStein)
}
// Employee overloads Sayhi
func (e *Employee) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s, I work at %s. Call me on %s\n", e.name,
e.company, e.phone) //Yes you can split into 2 lines here.
}
func (s *Student) BorrowMoney(amount float32) {
s.loan += amount // (again and again and...)
}
func (e *Employee) SpendSalary(amount float32) {
e.money -= amount // More vodka please!!! Get me through the day!
}
// define interface
type Men interface {
SayHi()
Sing(lyrics string)
Guzzle(beerStein string)
}
type YoungChap interface {
SayHi()
Sing(song string)
BorrowMoney(amount float32)
}
type ElderlyGent interface {
SayHi()
Sing(song string)
SpendSalary(amount float32)
}

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We know that an interface can be implemented by any type, and one type can implement
many interfaces simultaneously.
Note that any type implements the empty interface interface{} because it doesn't have
any methods and all types have zero methods by default.

Value of interface
So what kind of values can be put in the interface? If we define a variable as a type
interface, any type that implements the interface can assigned to this variable.
Like the above example, if we define a variable "m" as interface Men, then any one of
Student, Human or Employee can be assigned to "m". So we could have a slice of Men, and
any type that implements interface Men can assign to this slice. Be aware however that the
slice of interface doesn't have the same behavior as a slice of other types.
package main
import "fmt"
type Human struct {
name string
age int
phone string
}
type Student struct {
Human
school string
loan float32
}
type Employee struct {
Human
company string
money float32
}
func (h Human) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s you can call me on %s\n", h.name, h.phone)
}
func (h Human) Sing(lyrics string) {
fmt.Println("La la la la...", lyrics)
}
func (e Employee) SayHi() {
fmt.Printf("Hi, I am %s, I work at %s. Call me on %s\n", e.name,
e.company, e.phone) //Yes you can split into 2 lines here.

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}
// Interface Men implemented by Human, Student and Employee
type Men interface {
SayHi()
Sing(lyrics string)
}
func main() {
mike := Student{Human{"Mike", 25, "222-222-XXX"}, "MIT", 0.00}
paul := Student{Human{"Paul", 26, "111-222-XXX"}, "Harvard", 100}
sam := Employee{Human{"Sam", 36, "444-222-XXX"}, "Golang Inc.", 1000}
tom := Employee{Human{"Sam", 36, "444-222-XXX"}, "Things Ltd.", 5000}
// define interface i
var i Men
//i can store Student
i = mike
fmt.Println("This is Mike, a Student:")
i.SayHi()
i.Sing("November rain")
//i can store Employee
i = tom
fmt.Println("This is Tom, an Employee:")
i.SayHi()
i.Sing("Born to be wild")
// slice of Men
fmt.Println("Let's use a slice of Men and see what happens")
x := make([]Men, 3)
// these three elements are different types but they all implemented interface Men
x[0], x[1], x[2] = paul, sam, mike
for _, value := range x {
value.SayHi()
}
}

An interface is a set of abstract methods, and can be implemented by non-interface types. It

cannot therefore implement itself.

Empty interface
An empty interface is an interface that doesn't contain any methods, so all types implement
an empty interface. This fact is very useful when we want to store all types at some point,
and is similar to void* in C.

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// define a as empty interface

var a interface{}
var i int = 5
s := "Hello world"
// a can store value of any type
a = i
a = s

If a function uses an empty interface as its argument type, it can accept any type; if a
function uses empty interface as its return value type, it can return any type.

Method arguments of an interface

Any variable can be used in an interface. So how can we use this feature to pass any type of
variable to a function?
For example we use fmt.Println a lot, but have you ever noticed that it can accept any type of
argument? Looking at the open source code of fmt, we see the following definition.
type Stringer interface {
String() string
}

This means any type that implements interface Stringer can be passed to fmt.Println as an
argument. Let's prove it.

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package main
import (
"fmt"
"strconv"
)
type Human struct {
name string
age int
phone string
}
// Human implemented fmt.Stringer
func (h Human) String() string {
return "Name:" + h.name + ", Age:" + strconv.Itoa(h.age) + " years, Contact:" + h.phone
}
func main() {
Bob := Human{"Bob", 39, "000-7777-XXX"}
fmt.Println("This Human is : ", Bob)
}

Looking back to the example of Box, you will find that Color implements interface Stringer as
well, so we are able to customize the print format. If we don't implement this interface,
fmt.Println prints the type with its default format.
fmt.Println("The biggest one is", boxes.BiggestsColor().String())
fmt.Println("The biggest one is", boxes.BiggestsColor())

Attention: If the type implemented the interface error , fmt will call error() , so you don't
have to implement Stringer at this point.

Type of variable in an interface

If a variable is the type that implements an interface, we know that any other type that
implements the same interface can be assigned to this variable. The question is how can we
know the specific type stored in the interface. There are two ways which I will show you.
Assertion of Comma-ok pattern
Go has the syntax value, ok := element.(T) . This checks to see if the variable is the type
that we expect, where "value" is the value of the variable, "ok" is a variable of boolean type,
"element" is the interface variable and the T is the type of assertion.
If the element is the type that we expect, ok will be true, false otherwise.
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Let's use an example to see more clearly.

package main
import (
"fmt"
"strconv"
)
type Element interface{}
type List []Element
type Person struct {
name string
age int
}
func (p Person) String() string {
return "(name: " + p.name + " - age: " + strconv.Itoa(p.age) + " years)"
}
func main() {
list := make(List, 3)
list[0] = 1 // an int
list[1] = "Hello" // a string
list[2] = Person{"Dennis", 70}
for index, element := range list {
if value, ok := element.(int); ok {
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is an int and its value is %d\n", index, value)
} else if value, ok := element.(string); ok {
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is a string and its value is %s\n", index, value)
} else if value, ok := element.(Person); ok {
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is a Person and its value is %s\n", index, value)
} else {
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is of a different type\n", index)
}
}
}

It's quite easy to use this pattern, but if we have many types to test, we'd better use switch .
switch test
Let's use switch to rewrite the above example.

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package main
import (
"fmt"
"strconv"
)
type Element interface{}
type List []Element
type Person struct {
name string
age int
}
func (p Person) String() string {
return "(name: " + p.name + " - age: " + strconv.Itoa(p.age) + " years)"
}
func main() {
list := make(List, 3)
list[0] = 1 //an int
list[1] = "Hello" //a string
list[2] = Person{"Dennis", 70}
for index, element := range list {
switch value := element.(type) {
case int:
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is an int and its value is %d\n", index, value)
case string:
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is a string and its value is %s\n", index, value)
case Person:
fmt.Printf("list[%d] is a Person and its value is %s\n", index, value)
default:
fmt.Println("list[%d] is of a different type", index)
}
}
}

One thing you should remember is that element.(type) cannot be used outside of the
switch body, which means in that case you have to use the comma-ok pattern .

Embedded interfaces
The most beautiful thing is that Go has a lot of built-in logic syntax, such as anonymous
fields in struct. Not suprisingly, we can use interfaces as anonymous fields as well, but we
call them Embedded interfaces . Here, we follow the same rules as anonymous fields. More

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specifically, if an interface has another interface embedded within it, it will behave as if it has
all the methods that the embedded interface has.
We can see that the source file in container/heap has the following definition:
type Interface interface {
sort.Interface // embedded sort.Interface
Push(x interface{}) //a Push method to push elements into the heap
Pop() interface{} //a Pop method that pops elements from the heap
}

We see that sort.Interface is an embedded interface, so the above Interface has the three
methods contained within the sort.Interface implicitly.
type Interface interface {
// Len is the number of elements in the collection.
Len() int
// Less returns whether the element with index i should sort
// before the element with index j.
Less(i, j int) bool
// Swap swaps the elements with indexes i and j.
Swap(i, j int)
}

Another example is the io.ReadWriter in package io .

// io.ReadWriter
type ReadWriter interface {
Reader
Writer
}

Reflection
Reflection in Go is used for determining information at runtime. We use the reflect
package, and this official article explains how reflect works in Go.
There are three steps involved when using reflect. First, we need to convert an interface to
reflect types (reflect.Type or reflect.Value, this depends on the situation).
t := reflect.TypeOf(i) // get meta-data in type i, and use t to get all elements
v := reflect.ValueOf(i) // get actual value in type i, and use v to change its value

After that, we can convert the reflected types to get the values that we need.

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var x float64 = 3.4

v := reflect.ValueOf(x)
fmt.Println("type:", v.Type())
fmt.Println("kind is float64:", v.Kind() == reflect.Float64)
fmt.Println("value:", v.Float())

Finally, if we want to change the values of the reflected types, we need to make it modifiable.
As discussed earlier, there is a difference between pass by value and pass by reference.
The following code will not compile.
var x float64 = 3.4
v := reflect.ValueOf(x)
v.SetFloat(7.1)

Instead, we must use the following code to change the values from reflect types.
var x float64 = 3.4
p := reflect.ValueOf(&x)
v := p.Elem()
v.SetFloat(7.1)

We have just discussed the basics of reflection, however you must practice more in order to
understand more.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Object-oriented
Next section: Concurrency

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Concurrency
It is said that Go is the C language of the 21st century. I think there are two reasons: first, Go
is a simple language; second, concurrency is a hot topic in today's world, and Go supports
this feature at the language level.

goroutine
goroutines and concurrency are built into the core design of Go. They're similar to threads
but work differently. More than a dozen goroutines maybe only have 5 or 6 underlying
threads. Go also gives you full support to sharing memory in your goroutines. One goroutine
usually uses 4~5 KB of stack memory. Therefore, it's not hard to run thousands of
goroutines on a single computer. A goroutine is more lightweight, more efficient and more
convenient than system threads.
goroutines run on the thread manager at runtime in Go. We use the go keyword to create a
new goroutine, which is a function at the underlying level ( main() is a goroutine ).
go hello(a, b, c)

Let's see an example.

package main
import (
"fmt"
"runtime"
)
func say(s string) {
for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
runtime.Gosched()
fmt.Println(s)
}
}
func main() {
go say("world") // create a new goroutine
say("hello") // current goroutine
}

Output

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hello
world
hello
world
hello
world
hello
world
hello

We see that it's very easy to use concurrency in Go by using the keyword go . In the above
example, these two goroutines share some memory, but we would better off following the
design recipe: Don't use shared data to communicate, use communication to share data.
runtime.Gosched() means let the CPU execute other goroutines, and come back at some
point.
The scheduler only uses one thread to run all goroutines, which means it only implements
concurrency. If you want to use more CPU cores in order to take advantage of parallel
processing, you have to call runtime.GOMAXPROCS(n) to set the number of cores you want
to use. If n<1 , it changes nothing. This function may be removed in the future, see more
details about parallel processing and concurrency in this article.

channels
goroutines run in the same memory address space, so you have to maintain synchronization
when you want to access shared memory. How do you communicate between different
goroutines? Go uses a very good communication mechanism called channel . channel is
like a two-way pipeline in Unix shells: use channel to send or receive data. The only data
type that can be used in channels is the type channel and the keyword chan . Be aware
that you have to use make to create a new channel .
ci := make(chan int)
cs := make(chan string)
cf := make(chan interface{})

channel uses the operator <- to send or receive data.

ch <- v // send v to channel ch.
v := <-ch // receive data from ch, and assign to v

Let's see more examples.

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package main
import "fmt"
func sum(a []int, c chan int) {
total := 0
for _, v := range a {
total += v
}
c <- total // send total to c
}
func main() {
a := []int{7, 2, 8, -9, 4, 0}
c := make(chan int)
go sum(a[:len(a)/2], c)
go sum(a[len(a)/2:], c)
x, y := <-c, <-c // receive from c
fmt.Println(x, y, x + y)
}

Sending and receiving data in channels blocks by default, so it's much easier to use
synchronous goroutines. What I mean by block is that a goroutine will not continue when
receiving data from an empty channel, i.e ( value := <-ch ), until other goroutines send data
to this channel. On the other hand, the goroutine will not continue until the data it sends to a
channel, i.e ( ch<-5 ), is received.

Buffered channels
I introduced non-buffered channels above. Go also has buffered channels that can store
more than a single element. For example, ch := make(chan bool, 4) , here we create a
channel that can store 4 boolean elements. So in this channel, we are able to send 4
elements into it without blocking, but the goroutine will be blocked when you try to send a
fifth element and no goroutine receives it.
ch := make(chan type, n)
n == 0 ! non-bufferblock
n > 0 ! buffernon-block until n elements in the channel

You can try the following code on your computer and change some values.

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package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
c := make(chan int, 2) // change 2 to 1 will have runtime error, but 3 is fine
c <- 1
c <- 2
fmt.Println(<-c)
fmt.Println(<-c)
}

Range and Close

We can use range to operate on buffer channels as in slice and map.
package main
import (
"fmt"
)
func fibonacci(n int, c chan int) {
x, y := 1, 1
for i := 0; i < n; i++ {
c <- x
x, y = y, x + y
}
close(c)
}
func main() {
c := make(chan int, 10)
go fibonacci(cap(c), c)
for i := range c {
fmt.Println(i)
}
}

for i := range c will not stop reading data from channel until the channel is closed. We

use the keyword close to close the channel in above example. It's impossible to send or
receive data on a closed channel; you can use v, ok := <-ch to test if a channel is closed.
If ok returns false, it means the there is no data in that channel and it was closed.
Remember to always close channels in producers and not in consumers, or it's very easy to
get into panic status.

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Another thing you need to remember is that channels are not like files. You don't have to
close them frequently unless you are sure the channel is completely useless, or you want to
exit range loops.

Select
In the above examples, we only use one channel, but how can we deal with more than one
channel? Go has a keyword called select to listen to many channels.
select is blocking by default and it continues to execute only when one of channels has

data to send or receive. If several channels are ready to use at the same time, select
chooses which to execute randomly.
package main
import "fmt"
func fibonacci(c, quit chan int) {
x, y := 1, 1
for {
select {
case c <- x:
x, y = y, x + y
case <-quit:
fmt.Println("quit")
return
}
}
}
func main() {
c := make(chan int)
quit := make(chan int)
go func() {
for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
fmt.Println(<-c)
}
quit <- 0
}()
fibonacci(c, quit)
}

select has a default case as well, just like switch . When all the channels are not ready

for use, it executes the default case (it doesn't wait for the channel anymore).

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select {
case i := <-c:
// use i
default:
// executes here when c is blocked
}

Timeout
Sometimes a goroutine becomes blocked. How can we avoid this to prevent the whole
program from blocking? It's simple, we can set a timeout in the select.
func main() {
c := make(chan int)
o := make(chan bool)
go func() {
for {
select {
case v := <- c:
println(v)
case <- time.After(5 * time.Second):
println("timeout")
o <- true
break
}
}
}()
<- o
}

Runtime goroutine
The package runtime has some functions for dealing with goroutines.
runtime.Goexit()

Exits the current goroutine, but defered functions will be executed as usual.
runtime.Gosched()

Lets the scheduler execute other goroutines and comes back at some point.
runtime.NumCPU() int

Returns the number of CPU cores

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runtime.NumGoroutine() int

Returns the number of goroutines

runtime.GOMAXPROCS(n int) int

Sets how many CPU cores you want to use

Links
Directory
Previous section: interface
Next section: Summary

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2.8 Summary
In this chapter, we mainly introduced the 25 Go keywords. Let's review what they are and
what they do.
break default func interface select
case defer go map struct
chan else goto package switch
const fallthrough if range type
continue for import return var

var and const are used to define variables and constants.

package and import are for package use.
func is used to define functions and methods.
return is used to return values in functions or methods.
defer is used to define defer functions.
go is used to start a new goroutine.
select is used to switch over multiple channels for communication.
interface is used to define interfaces.
struct is used to define special customized types.
break , case , continue , for , fallthrough , else , if , switch , goto and
default were introduced in section 2.3.
chan is the type of channel for communication among goroutines.
type is used to define customized types.
map is used to define map which is similar to hash tables in other languages.
range is used for reading data from slice , map and channel .

If you understand how to use these 25 keywords, you've learned a lot of Go already.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Concurrency
Next chapter: Web Programming basics

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Go Programming Basics
Go is a statically typed language and it is an easy to learn language. But that doesn't mean
that programming in Go is really simple, becuase some times it can cause some really
subtle bugs which tend to be impossible to find, so we need to be careful in general while
programming. Go also has many restrictions like you can't have an unused variable. Go
doesn't require you to add semi colons at the end of each line, but the compiler does add
semi colons at the end of each line, this is the reason braces are used for formatting. Go is a
complied language, which means when we compile the code, it'll generate a statically linked
binary. This means that after building your project (for your machine) you can take that
binary and run it on machine with the same OS. If your project involves the use of non Go
files then you have to carry them along with the binary file since things don't scale well if the
binary file has the static files.

Workspace
The standard way of writing Go code is to make a directory and assign it to the environment
variable $GOPATH . In most unix systems it is done with export GOPATH=/usr/home/suraj/Go .
The idea is that all your Go code should reside in a directory tree so the code isn't lying
around in random places. There is another environment variable $GOROOT which holds the
installation of Go language itself and is not to be confused with $GOPATH .
My $GOPATH is /usr/home/suraj/Go , it has the following structure
pkg: The libraries which'll be imported in our code, there is a .a file created at the
respective path.
bin: The binary file of our project will be installed here on calling Go install in the
project folder
src: Will hold the actual code, if you have a github account, then you can create a folder
tree inside like
Go
src
github.com
thewhitetulip
wshare
picsort
golang.net
sourcegraph.com

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bin (binaries)
wshare
picsort
pkg
This makes it easy for organizing code because all my Go code lies in
$GOPATH/src/github.com/thewhitetulip , and the rest of the code lies two levels up in
$GOPATH/src . It also makes life easy for packages, as we'll see in the next sections,

especially if you want to distribute your application or packages.

Packages
Packages are a very integral part of the Go language since it was designed for building
complex software for large teams. Unlike other languages one doesn't need to do anything
out of the ordinary for creating packages in Go, all you are required to do is create a folder of
the name of the package and then use the statement package name in each file which
resides in the folder which you created. Please note that in each such folder/package there
can be only one file with the main package declared, that is because when we build the Go
code, the complier will get confused which file to build. Using packages is as easy as
creating them.
Don't use the MVC pattern just for the sake of using it, write a small web application entirely
in the main.go file and later try to add a new feature to the application, then you'll realize
that having one file doesn't scale well, yes that is general knowledge but avoid doing things
without understanding them well first.
I didn't make the models & views initially, all handlers were moved into a views.go file
located in a views folder, this became the views package.
The database related methods went into a db package.
The package name is db , but the way to name packages is to give their path from the
$GOPATH/src directory, the reason being when the package is resolved by the Go compiler,

then it first looks in the standard library and then starts looking for the full name in the
$GOPATH/src folder. Hence it is imperative to use the full name, else the code won't compile,

which is useless if your application is distributed via the likes of Github.

Creating packages is useful in code reuse. This is the reason there needs to be a strong and
active community across a language for it to be useful.
Regarding the naming convention one might argue that we'll make the folders directly inside
the src directory, in that way we can import packages which have a single letter names like
database , while this is possible, it is not recommended for multiple reasons, first, it might

break the flow of people who fork your project, for instance when you clone

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github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/ it'll import all the required packages too, and if the

packages were created just in the src directory, then it'll break the application, since if my db
package isn't github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/db but just db then the go get command
will be unable to get the db package.
The downside of this is that when someone wants to fork your project, they have to rename
all the package declarations.

The main package

The main package is a special package in Go, its creation is optional, but if created, special
care needs to be taken while building/running the application.
With main package: code example file: code/3.0gobuild.sh
[Tasks] $ go build main/main.go
[Tasks] $ ./main/main

But if you Go to main folder and build and run then it won't run
[Tasks/main] $ go build main.go
[Tasks/main] $ ./main

This won't run because as per our instruction, the binary will expect all the static files and the
rest of the packages in the current directory, which is the directory called main, but all our
other files are present one level up, so we have to ensure that we call the binary from one
level up.

Internal deployment
We'll code in our $GOPATH/src/github.com folder, but we also need to keep a deployment
version on your machine. Since I use Tasks on a regular basis, I have made a folder
~/Tasks and here I keep the deployment version of Tasks, which contains the binary

version and the static files.

Running a server
Usually we run a server on some random 8000+ port, so it doesn't affect some other
application which might be using ports, godoc uses the port 6060 . While running a server,
we have to bind the server to some IP address, we can use a public IP address, which
would mean that anyone can visit your web app over the Internet, or by using a private IP.

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But if you are on a private network, your machine is assigned an IP address, which can start
with 192.0.0.0 or 10.0.0.0 . If you run a server on that IP address, then your web server is
accessible from over your LAN, so anyone in your LAN can use the web application.
So there are security implications while running your server, if you do
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))

Then it'll bind the server to the IP address your machine is on the LAN. If you want your web
application to be visible from only your machine then
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe("127.0.0.1:8080", nil))

Note: 127.0.0.1
127.0.0.1 is generally called localhost, which is a special IP address which is given to

every machine to refer to itself. it doesn't matter if you are connected to the network or not,
your machine will always have this IP address, so if you are wanting privacy for your web
application bind it to 127.0.0.1 because no other machine in the world other than your own
can see this IP address, if some other machine goes to localhost or 127.0.0.1 then it'll
refer to itself.
Where as if you do want your web application to be accessible then bind it to
0.0.0.0.0:8080 or just :8080 , when you give just the port number, the Go language

assumes the IP address the machine is on but not 127.0.0.1 .

Links
Directory
Previous section: Tools
Next section: Web Programming Basics

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Web Programming Basics

Web servers are programs which respond to requests, the format of the request is the HTTP
protocol.
An HTTP Request from the client (browser/cURL/bots ) gets an HTTP Response from the
server. The Go language has the net/http library which enables the programmers to write
applications for using HTTP. We use this library to read requests which we receive and
respond with HTTP responses which we build by using the same library.
The HTTP protocol initially was built only for transferring plain text, but later it started
supporting multimedia content too. When we type www.github.com on our browser's address
bar, then it by default adds https:// or http:// and a trailing forward slash, so our
request becomes HTTP GET / github.com. Our browser will locate the IP address of the
website github.com and sent in a HTTP GET / request, the server of github.com will take the
request, go to the view handler handling the URL pattern, typically / is the default pattern
which shows the login page or some non critical stuff until you login.
Until AJAX was invented servers served static html pages, now it is possible to do async
communication between the client and the server, which, in plain English means that you
can change the data on a page without refreshing the page. Which is cool and is expected of
any modern website running in the 21'st century. But of course as with everything in life, you
first have to walk before you run, so first static html then AJAX enabled html.
There are two major HTTP methods, GET and POST , GET is used to basically get the
document stored for a URL, suppose GET / will get the home page for that website, but
when we have to send data to the server, suppose we fill a registration form, then the page
sends a POST request to some URL which then reads the data of the form and does
something appropriate with it.
For deleting an item we should use the DELETE request. It is quite easy to send HTTP
request via AJAX, we'll see how to send then in the chapter on AJAX.

GET vs POST
GET was created to get a resource over HTTP, for instance if you visit any website, then the
browser sends a GET request with the URL / to the server. POST was created to send data
from the client to the server.

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In GET the data transferred is via the URL in POST the data isn't hidden or encrypted by
default, but it isn't sent via the URL, it is easily accessible to anyone who knows how to read
a HTTP request, which isn't rocket science really. Security isn't something you add at the
end of the application like a cherry on the cake, it is something you build your application
around. In short there isn't much difference between GET and POST when we consider
security, both transfer data in plain text the thing is GET is relatively a little less secure
since the URL is logged by a proxy server/firewall/browser history and that GET requests
can be done by the browser on behalf of the user without confirmation. Bots are common
over the internet, bots can visit randomly to every link present in your application, but they
don't send random data to any Form you have.
If you want to deploy your application into the wild, you have to use HTTPS, but that too
can't help if the user is naive and responds to a Man in the middle attack, where an attacker
sets up a similar looking website and tricks the user into revealing their username and
password. Long story short, security isn't absolute but it is upto the developer to have a
relatively less insecure website, which means it should check use the HTTP methods
correctly, sanitize all data coming from the user and stop a malicious user in all the normal
ways to exploit a web application.
// Create a new category.
// PUT /categories
// Handler function returns the ID of the new category.
r.HandleFunc("/categories", views.PutCategoryFunc).
Methods("PUT")
// Update an existing category.
// POST /categories/12
r.HandleFunc("/categories/{id}", views.PostCategoryFunc).
Methods("POST")
// View the details of a category.
// GET /categories/12
r.HandleFunc("/categories/{id}", views.GetCategoryFunc).
Methods("GET")
// Delete an existing category.
// DELETE /categories/12
r.HandleFunc("/categories/{id}", views.DeleteCategoryFunc).
Methods("DELETE")

With these routes, think of "/categories" as a directory containing JSON or XML files. Each
file has a name like "12" that contains the details of a category. To create a new category
you PUT a new file into the directory. To view the category you GET the category at
"/categories/12", and to delete the category you DELETE the file at "/categories/12".

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Thus when we want to delete a task, then rather than sending GET /delete/1234, we should
send a DELETE /tasks/1234.
Here routers come into picture and the architecture of the application is significantly reduced
because we aren't trying to use GET for everything, but we are using the same URL in a
different context with the different HTTP method.

Example
Suppose we run a blog, the smallest component of which is a post, a post has tags, it is
written by some author, at some time and has some primary key to uniquely identify it in our
database and it has a slug which means the URL.
Earlier URLs used to be ugly, but now they are beautiful, like our fictional blog has this post,
surajblog.com/posts/welcome-the-new-year , the slug is the welcome-the-new-year .

When the server gets a HTTP GET request of /posts/welcome-the-new-year , it'll search for
URL handlers starting with the list of URL handlers we have given, then it'll find the closest
match, in our case it'll be /post/ , then it'll call the handler of this URL. The library will go
from the top to bottom of the HandleFunc listing, hence our / root URL should be at the
very bottom of our list.
http.HandleFunc("/post/", ShowPostBySlug)
http.HandleFunc("/", ShowAllPosts)

What this handler will do is that it'll go to the database, fetch the (id, title, content, time) from
the database for that particular post then it'll read a template and populate data into the
template, which is ultimately the HTML document which is sent back to our browser.

What is a template?
Templates are a way to present data to the user. When the server responds with an HTTP
Response, it has to send an HTML page to the browser. They are a set of parameterized
html pages which has a mechanism to load data.
We put in variables in the template which are populated as per the data sent while the
template is executed. So rather than have an individual page for each response, we club all
pages into types, suppose a profile page, a timeline page and an edit page. We then pass
the username and the details of the profile to the profile page, so one template can show the
profile information to multiple users with different data. The same goes with every other
example.

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So writing a web application essentially means, we have to decide upon the URLs, the
structure of the database and write functions in Go to handle each supported pattern of URL,
fetch data from the database, write templates to populate data in templates corresponding to
each URL, the handlers which we write populate data in the templates, a method generally
known as rendering.
Not abusing templates
Templates support a lot of things like template variables, but one has to make sure that there
is no business logic inside the template. We separate the business logic from the
presentation logic, since templates are a way to represent data and not a way to manipulate
data. Web apps which follow these are easily maintainable since the change in business
logic doesn't mean that we have to change everything, but with one app divided into
modules, this triggers a change in that particular part of the module.
Suppose we write a todo list manager which supports multiple users, so we have to ensure
that we show tasks of that particular user rather than sending all the tasks to the template
and filtering there tasks which are of that user on every page. A better approach will surely
be to pass the tasks of only that user while rendering the template, so in the future if we
want to show tasks of some user and his friend, then we won't have to change the template,
we'll just modify the function which populates the Tasks object.
Below is such part of such method which is used to handle the backend functionality of our
EditTask URL which is /edit/<id> located at
file db/tasks.go
func GetTaskByID(id int) types.Context {
//Code to populate the tasks variable
context := types.Context{Tasks: tasks}
return context
}

If you notice, we aren't rendering the template here, because this is a database package
whose job is to return the appropriate data to the view, which will render the template from
the data sent by the database function. Thus we are separating the data fetching logic from
the data representation logic. The separation is going to come into significant light when we
add comments to our application. Thus rather than sending all data to our template and have
the template render data conditionally, we fix the Context object for the template and
render data according to that.
file views/addViews.go

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func EditTaskFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {

//Code
task := db.GetTaskByID(id)
editTemplate.Execute(w, task)
//Code
}

Thus we can split an application into views, database, templates and the main file. This is
the standard way of doing things in this world, not because it is the status quo, but because
it is easier to maintain the web applications that way and since maintainability is the holy
grail for software you are recommended to follow this. You should however try not using this
model once while learning, so you understand the exact merits of this process.

Static Files
Static files play a major role in our web application, they are all the CSS/JS/Images which
we load into our html pages we serve them over the URL pattern /static/ , the way this is
implemented is that whenever a request like /static/<filepath> , we go to the public
directory of our application and then look for the path which we got, if we get a file of that
path then we serve the file, othewise it automatically sends a 404 error.
The project structure should include a public which'll contain all your static files. We will
have a templates folder on the same folder where the public is present. The internal
structure can be anything you like for you are going to reference the path names in your
code.
The reason templates is a separate folder is that we do not want it to be accessible form
inside the http.Dir function of the /static/ URL.
public
| |-- static
| | |-- css
| | | `-- styles.css
..and more
| | `-- js
| | |-- bootstrap.min.js
| | .... and more
templates
| |-- completed.html
| | ...and more

Note Output
The above output is of the tree program.

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If you are to implement the static file serving handler yourself, make sure you sanitize the
input, because an attacker might send some malicious request like GET ../../ then we must
not provide a HTTP response with the listing of the directory two levels up. This is very
critical, we should always send an HTTP 404 response to anything but the static files, now
one might say how does the attacker know the file name or the folder structure. In network
security, an attacker who has decided he has to get inside will get inside, with infinite
attempts and infinite time, so we have to strive for making the time taken for breaking into
our servers as big as possible.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Go Programming Basics
Next section: Basics webapp

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Basic web application

We import the http package in our application with import net/http .
Make a folder in your $GOPATH/src/github.com/<yourname>/Tasks substitute your username in
lieu of <yourname> . For the sake of consistency, I am going to use thewhitetulip.
[Tasks] $ mkdir main
[Tasks] $ touch main/main.go

file main/main.go
package main
import (
"log"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
PORT := ":8080"
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(PORT, nil))
}

Note 127.0.0.1 vs 0.0.0.0

If you don't understand the implications of running a server on 127.0.0.1 vs 0.0.0.0, go back
to chapter two to read more about it.
Now go to your terminal and type
[Tasks] $ go run main/main.go

After you run the main.go file, you will notice that the program does nothing, it doesn't print
anything because we told it only to listen on the port, this is according to the logic of Go that
no message is good and that errors have to be explicit. But there is no need to adhere to

that philosophy 100% because some times it is good to notify what is happening to the
application, of course it doesn't mean that we print each and every thing happening in the
execution, that is for the -v verbose mode.
Make this change to the main file
code example file: 3.1basicServer.go

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package main
import (
"log"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
PORT := ":8080"
log.Print("Running server on "+ PORT)
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(PORT, nil))
}

Now run this like we mentioned above and we see this message on the terminal
2016/01/01 22:00:36 Running server on :8080

Open your browser and open localhost:8080 , you'll get the message "404 page not found"
This is because as of now we have just started a server to listen on the port 8080, but we
haven't written anything to it yet. When we go to localhost:8080 , we are sending a HTTP
GET request with the URL as / , and since it can't find any handler handling the / URL,
it'll display the standard HTTP404 error, which means page not found.

Handling URLs
http.HandleFunc("/complete/", CompleteTaskFunc)
//ShowCompleteTasksFunc is used to populate the "/completed/" URL
func ShowCompleteTasksFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
}

We use the HandleFunc function in the net/http package to handle the URLs. In this
function we pass the first argument as the URL to be handled and the second parameter as
either the full fledged function definition or a function object while it is possible to define a
function in the parameter itself, it isn't the best way to write a web application and should be
avoided.
The handler function requires two arguments, the object of the ResponseWriter and that of
the Request, if you see the documentation then you'll notice that the Request object
contains all the things which came in with the request, r.Method will hold if the method is
GET or POST or any other method for that matter.

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While the request object will store all the information related to the HTTP request that we are
going to serve, the ResponseWriter object will store the output which our server is going to
give for that request, we'll write data to it, either directly using the Write method or by
executing a template.

Simple Handler
We will wrap this chapter up with an example of writing the URL name on the page we are
rendering, so if the user goes to /golang/1234 then will write /golang/1234 on the webpage
which she gets to see on localhost:8080/golang/1234 .
package main
import (
"log"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
PORT := ":8080"
log.Print("Running server on "+ PORT)
http.HandleFunc("/",CompleteTaskFunc)
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(PORT, nil))
}
func CompleteTaskFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
w.Write([]byte(r.URL.Path))
}

Parameterized routing
The above example works fine, as long as it is simple enough, we need to make
modifications for handling parameterized routing.
//DeleteTaskFunc is used to delete a task,
//trash = move to recycle bin, delete = permanent delete
func DeleteTaskFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "GET" {
id := r.URL.Path[len("/delete/"):]
w.Write([]byte("delete the "+id+ " task"))
}

Note Parameterized routing

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Here we are checking the method type in each view, we can totally use a router like
httprouter or any other suitable one, but we want to see how things work in pure Go, thus we
aren't using a mux/router.
Note DELETE HTTP verb
Here you will notice that we aren't using the DELETE / request, this is because we'll use it
later in the book when we AJAXIFY the application, for now, we'll do it like GET /delete/1234,
just to get a hang of developing a fairly sophisticated application.
Since in a previous example we showed how to get hold of the URL in a view handler it is
only intuitive that when we process the handler we take the URL, then take a sub string of
the URL and remove the /delete/ part and we have the ID of the task which we'll now
delete.
This example makes use of the slicing concept. It is simple, if Path is our string variable
then Path[1:] is the substring which includes everything from the first character, index zero.

Serving static files

http.Handle("/static/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("public")))

For static file serving, we use the FileServer method present in the http package which
serves the files which of the folder which is given as an argument of the function.
The FileServer is a built in method in net/http which is used to serve a file over HTTP.
Static files are equally as important for our webapplication as our other files are, because for
the matter static files are the files which are going to support the front end logic, like CSS/JS.

Homework
No book can just be read, you have to take some additional efforts on your side too
Read the documentation of net/http & log and get to know of the methods/functions
in the packages [1]
Find out how many alternatives are there to ListenAndServe.
Write a handler to serve static files, if file is available on that path then it should serve
the file, otherwise it must return an HTTP404 error.
Write a command line application to share files/folder over HTTP, the syntax should be
like this ./wshare -f file.pdf file on link = 192.168.2.1:8080.

Footnotes
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[1]: one amazing aspect of Go is its small library, at any point of time it is possible to know all
the functions of one package, this is not possible with other languages who have blown up to
the state where you can't program without a manual, but that doesn't mean that reading
manuals is bad, on contrary it is going to help if we read more documentation, which detail
the API.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Web Programming Basics
Next section: Designing our web app

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Designing our web app

We are going to build a todo list manager, so we have to decide upon what our webapp will
do. The design phase is the most important in any software project since it is the making or
breaking point for the ones who implement, and one small mistake in designing costs the
project serverly and what we call as a solution for a design problem isn't really a solution but
it is a hack, a glue which sticks things together.
Our webapp is going to be a todo list manager for a single user, so it'll have the following
features:
1. Ability to add/delete/modify task.
2. Ability to mark tasks as complete/incomplete.
3. Display the tasks as a one column list.
4. Ability to switch modes between pending/completed/deleted tasks
5. Display notifications like note added/deleted/archived
6. Search for text and highlight the text in the search results page.

The Design
There is an urge for getting to program as soon as possible, but in Software Engineering,
actual programming constitutes around 5% of all the effort, for programming is just
translating ideas into computer executable code. Hence the time given to design is very
important for any application.
We decide on our API, for instance how exactly is our app going to behave?

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/add/ POST = add new task

/ GET = show pending tasks
/complete/ GET = show completed tasks
/deleted/ GET = show deleted tasks
/edit/<id> POST = edit post
/edit/<id> GET = show the edit page
/trash/<id> POST = trash post to recycle bin
/delete/<id> POST = permanently delete post
/complete/<id> POST = mark post as complete
/login/ POST = do the login
/login/ GET = show login page and if user is not
authenticated then show /login/ for any URL
/logout/ POST = log the user out
/restore/<id> POST = restore that task
/update/<id> POST = update task, edit page will call this URL
/change/ GET = will allow changing password
/register/ GET = show the register page
/register/ POST = will add entries into database

file ~/main/main.go
package main
import (
"log"
"net/http"
)
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/", ShowAllTasksFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/complete/", CompleteTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/delete/", DeleteTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/deleted/", ShowTrashTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/trash/", TrashTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/edit/", EditTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/completed/", ShowCompleteTasksFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/restore/", RestoreTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/add/", AddTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/update/", UpdateTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/search/", SearchTaskFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/login", GetLogin)
http.HandleFunc("/register", PostRegister)
http.HandleFunc("/admin", HandleAdmin)
http.HandleFunc("/add_user", PostAddUser)
http.HandleFunc("/change", PostChange)
http.HandleFunc("/logout", HandleLogout)
http.Handle("/static/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("public")))
log.Print("running on port 8080")
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))
}

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In this file itself, create all functions we mentioned above and make the necessary changes
as per one definition that we show below
func ShowAllTasksFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "GET" {
message := "all pending tasks GET"
} else {
message := "all pending tasks POST"
}
w.Write([]byte(message))
}

After you create these functions run the server as below,

[Tasks] $ go build main/main.go
[Tasks] $ ./main/main

In your browser type localhost:8080 and type all these URLs and see what message you
get.

Router
Currently we aren't using a router because we want to implement as much functionality as
possible ourselves, this, by no means says that routers are a waste. We do not use AJAX
right now, just plain HTTP so routers won't matter much. When we add in AJAX handlers,
then we need to route our requests to respective handlers so we'd make one AJAX handler
and one non AJAX handler.
This is because we follow the MVC architecture in our application, which is model-viewcontroller. Our routing logic will be done in our controller, which will direct our requests to our
handlers, the handlers will talk to our database and render templates. Views populate data
into our templates.

Homework
Check the documentation for http.ResponseWriter and http.Request objects and get to
know all the variables/functions/constants for http package and these two which we
mentioned

Links
Directory

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Previous section: Basics webapp

Next section: Database setup

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Using databases in Go
Go doesn't provide out of the box support for any database, but it provides an interface,
which can be used by database library creators to keep all the database libraries compatible
with each other.
We will use the sqlite database for this book.

Creating and configuring database

If you don't have sqlite installed, you can use the package manager of your OS to install
sqlite3 database.
After installation use this DDL to create a table in our database
[Tasks] $ sqlite3 tasks.db
SQLite version 3.8.2 2013-12-06 14:53:30
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> CREATE TABLE task (
id integer primary key autoincrement,
title varchar(100),
content text,
is_deleted char(1) default 'N',
created_date timestamp,
last_modified_at timestamp,
finish_date timestamp
);

Use the following insert statements to enter data in our table, so we'll begin reading data in
our ShowAllTasks function which we wrote in the previous chapter

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INSERT INTO "task" VALUES(1,'Publish on github',

'Publish the source of tasks and picsort on github',
'N','2015-11-12 15:30:59','2015-11-21 14:19:22',
'2015-11-17 17:02:18');
INSERT INTO "task" VALUES(4,'gofmtall',
'The idea is to run gofmt -w file.go on every
go file in the listing, *Edit turns out this is is difficult
to do in golang **Edit barely 3 line bash script :P '
,'N','2015-11-12 16:58:31',
'2015-11-14 10:42:14','2015-11-13 13:16:48');
INSERT INTO "task" VALUES(7,'modifications to task',
'1. add search function #Done
2. a priority feature to task
3. comments on tasks
4. Due date
5. remove dependency on httprouter #Done',
'N','2015-11-13 04:23:27','2015-11-13 04:23:27',NULL);

Installing the sqlite driver for go

We'll use the go-sqlite3 driver created by mattn. The reason being it implements the
database/sql interface. Type this in your terminal:

go get "github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3"

Accessing database in go
We import the library as import _ "github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3"
We are importing our driver anonymously, when we import any package default it gets
imported as per its name, for instance when we import net/http the exported
variables/functions be available in the program as http for accessing functions and
variables of the package, but since go-sqlite3 is a database package which uses the
database/sql interface, we don't want all our database code to be specific to go-sqlite3,

hence we give an empty operator as an alias so we can use the functions without
mentioning explicitly the package name & the none of exported fields are available. This is
where the interoperability of databases comes into the picture.
Under the hood, the driver registers itself to the database/sql package.

Note The '_' operator

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The _ operator has a unique role in go, it is used to denote an empty variable, used when
we want to ignore data.
nums is an array, while we loop through arrays using range it returns a (key,value) pair. here

we ignore the key and print the value.

for _, value := range nums {
fmt.Println(value)
}

Also note that we can give a package alias instead of the underscore character should we
want an alias for our package.
Every database has a connection mechanism, file for sqlite and IP address for
MySQL/Postgres. We define it as a global variable since we want it to be accessible in the
package to keep our database access logic all in one package rather than sprinkling it
around recklessly.
var database *sql.DB
database, err = sql.Open("sqlite3", "./tasks.db")
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}

Note DB from godoc

type DB struct {
// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

DB is a database handle representing a pool of zero or more underlying connections. It's

safe for concurrent use by multiple goroutines.
The sql package creates and frees connections automatically; it also maintains a free pool of
idle connections. If the database has a concept of per-connection state, such state can only
be reliably observed within a transaction. We do not want this variable to be accessible from
outside the package so it is unexported. Open may just validate its arguments without
creating a connection to the database. To verify that the data source name is valid, call
Ping() . The returned DB is safe for concurrent use by multiple goroutines and maintains its

own pool of idle connections. Thus, the Open function should be called just once. It is rarely
necessary to close a DB.

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err = db.Ping()
if err != nil {
//do something about it
}

The sql.DB object shoudn't be opened and closed frequently, it should be closed only when
we no longer need to access the database.
Please refer to the documentation of database/sql for more details.
Note exported and unexported variables
In Go when a variable/function starts with a capital letter, it is public which means accessible
from packages which import the package. It is good practice to not keep any exported
variables which are not required.

Querying the database

Statements that dont return rows should not use Query functions; they should use Exec() .
From the go documentation
func (*DB) Exec
func (db *DB) Exec(query string, args ...interface{}) (Result, error)
Exec executes a query without returning any rows. The args are for any
placeholder parameters in the query.

We use the Query method to query the database when we expect some result from the
database.

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getTasksql = "select id, title, content, created_date from task

where finish_date is null and is_deleted='N' order by created_date asc"
rows, err := database.Query(getTasksql)
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
}
defer rows.Close()
for rows.Next() {
err := rows.Scan(&TaskID, &TaskTitle, &TaskContent, &TaskCreated)
TaskContent = strings.Replace(TaskContent, "\n", "<br>", -1)
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
}
fmt.Println(TaskID, TaskTitle, TaskContent, TaskCreated)
}

Note the defer keyword

We use defer inside a function call. package main import ( "fmt" "io/ioutil" "os" )
func main() {
file, err := os.Open('file.dat')
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("File doesn't exist or you don't have
read permission")
}
defer file.Close()
inputReader := bufio.NewReader(file)
//do something about inputReader
}

This guarantees us that the file will be closed before the main function returns, both in case
of normal/abnormal termination. Take note of the behaviour of defer before using it in your
code. Becuase if it is misused it causes very difficult to find bugs.
file ~/main/main.go
Find and fix the bug:

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package main
import (
_ "github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3"
"fmt"
)
var database *sql.DB
func init() {
defer database.Close()
database, err = sql.Open("sqlite3", "./tasks.db")
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
}
//intentional bug exists, fix it
func main() {
getTasksql = "select id, title, content, created_date from task
where finish_date is null and is_deleted='N' order by created_date asc"
rows, err := database.Query(getTasksql)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
defer rows.Close()
for rows.Next() {
err := rows.Scan(&TaskID, &TaskTitle, &TaskContent, &TaskCreated)
TaskContent = strings.Replace(TaskContent, "\n", "<br>", -1)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
fmt.Println(TaskID, TaskTitle, TaskContent, TaskCreated)
}
err = rows.Err()
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}

Always defer rows.Close() , that way we free the database connection in the pool for so
long as the rows contains the result set, the database connection is in use and not
available in the connection pool. When the rows.Next() function returns EOF (End of File),
which means that it has reached the end of records, it'll call rows.Close() for you, the
Close() can be called multiple times without side effects.

Note the init function

The init function is the function which executes first before the file is imported or
executed. So package level initialization should be done in this function.

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Single-Row Queries
If a query returns at most one row, you can use a shortcut:
var taskDescription string
query:="select taskDescription from task where id = ?"
err = db.QueryRow(query, 1).Scan(&taskDescription)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println(taskDescription)

Errors from the query are deferred until Scan() is called, and then are returned from that.
You can also call QueryRow() on a prepared statement:
query :="select taskDescription from task where id = ?"
stmt, err := db.Prepare(query, 1).Scan(&taskDescription)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
var taskDescription string
err = stmt.QueryRow(1).Scan(&taskDescription)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println(taskDescription)

Writing data into the database

We have seen how to fetch data from the database, now it is time to write data into the
database, this is done in two ways, by starting a transaction or without one. One should
always start a transaction before inserting data so we don't get issues. Don't take my word
for it, I'd encourage you to find out the other method to write data into the database and see
it for yourself.
Below lies an example of using transaction
file db/db.go

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//RestoreTask is used to restore tasks from the Trash

func RestoreTask(id int) error {
query := "update task set is_deleted='N',last_modified_at=datetime() where id=?"
restoreSQL, err := database.Prepare(query)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
tx, err := database.Begin()
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
_, err = tx.Stmt(restoreSQL).Exec(id)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("doing rollback")
tx.Rollback()
} else {
tx.Commit()
}
return err
}

We always use forms to get values that we have to write to the database, we get the title,
content, priority and other required things and use the above function like functions to insert
data into the database.
Note Prepare (from the go documentation)
Prepare creates a prepared statement for later queries or executions. Multiple queries or
executions may be run concurrently from the returned statement. The caller must call the
statement's Close method when the statement is no longer needed.
Note Error handling
Go takes a different approach to exception handling than popular languages which use the
try catch statements, although this results in one list in the if err != nil land, but this
makes the language small and simpler to handle exceptions because we don't need to
remember those 1010101 different classes the language/library takes care to identify the
exception type for us and returns a error string, which we check for nil and then take some
action on it.
An excellent resource about Go and databases can be found at http://go-database-sql.org
The fault in our code:
Fixing the intentional bug in the above code:

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func init() {
defer database.Close()
database, err = sql.Open("sqlite3", "./tasks.db")
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
}

The defer keyword calls the function when the calling function exits, in our case, init is a
special function, so basically we are opening the database and closing it immediately. Since
init is the first function to be executed.
You might want to use call the database.Close() method from a wrapper in the views
package through the main package. In this way, if the main function which will be the
controller of our application is terminated, we'll free up the database resource.
Homework
See the /code/chapter-4/4.5database in our code repository and modify the file to insert
data from the 4.3formsupload folder. We have two working code set, one of printing form
values on the console and one of fetching db values and rendering a template. What you
have to do is based on this chapter, write methods to insert values from the form to the
database.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Basic Functionality
Next section: Basic Example

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An Example
Expected output:
open your task.db file in sqlite3 like this
[Tasks] $ sqlite3 task.db
sqlite> select title from task limit 1;
Publish on github

Now this output should match with the one we see at localhost:8080
After running the file, go to localhost:8080 and localhost:8080/add
file ~/main/main.go
package main
import (
"database/sql"
"fmt"
_ "github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3"
"log"
"net/http"
"time"
)
var database *sql.DB
var err error
//Task is the struct used to identify tasks
type Task struct {
Id int
Title string
Content string
Created string
}
//Context is the struct passed to templates
type Context struct {
Tasks []Task
Navigation string
Search string
Message string
}
func init() {

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database, err = sql.Open("sqlite3", "./tasks.db")

if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
}
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/", ShowAllTasksFunc)
http.HandleFunc("/add/", AddTaskFunc)
fmt.Println("running on 8080")
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))
}
//ShowAllTasksFunc is used to handle the "/" URL which is the default one
func ShowAllTasksFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "GET" {
context := GetTasks() //true when you want non deleted notes
w.Write([]byte(context.Tasks[0].Title))
} else {
http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusFound)
}
}
func GetTasks() Context {
var task []Task
var context Context
var TaskID int
var TaskTitle string
var TaskContent string
var TaskCreated time.Time
var getTasksql string
getTasksql = "select id, title, content, created_date from task;"
rows, err := database.Query(getTasksql)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
defer rows.Close()
for rows.Next() {
err := rows.Scan(&TaskID, &TaskTitle, &TaskContent, &TaskCreated)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
TaskCreated = TaskCreated.Local()
a := Task{Id: TaskID, Title: TaskTitle, Content: TaskContent,
Created: TaskCreated.Format(time.UnixDate)[0:20]}
task = append(task, a)
}
context = Context{Tasks: task}
return context
}

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//AddTaskFunc is used to handle the addition of new task, "/add" URL

func AddTaskFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
title := "random title"
content := "random content"
truth := AddTask(title, content)
if truth != nil {
log.Fatal("Error adding task")
}
w.Write([]byte("Added task"))
}
//AddTask is used to add the task in the database
func AddTask(title, content string) error {
query:="insert into task(title, content, created_date, last_modified_at)\
values(?,?,datetime(), datetime())"
restoreSQL, err := database.Prepare(query)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
tx, err := database.Begin()
_, err = tx.Stmt(restoreSQL).Exec(title, content)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
tx.Rollback()
} else {
log.Print("insert successful")
tx.Commit()
}
return err
}

Homework
The homework is to split the code into packages and get it to work, the type definition goes
into the types/types.go file, the handler definition goes into the views/views.go , the
database read and write methods go into the db/db.go . Make sure that after you refactor
the code, that the code runs.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Database setup
Next section: Closing remarks

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Working with Forms

HTML forms are used to get data from the user. Forms can use both the GET and POST
methods for transferring data to the server, but it is recommended to use HTTP POST
method just because it doesn't highlight data in the URL and because of the many things we
discussed in the chapter Web Programming Basics.
Forms are rendered by templating, which we'll see in a later chapter. As of now we want to
understand how to get data from the end user by using forms.
There are two parts of working with forms, the HTML part and the Go part. The HTML page
gets the data and sends it to the server as a POST/GET and the Go part will parse the form
to do some task like letting the user to login or inserting data in the database.
Each form element has a name which is referenced in the server side part of the form, below
we have the file upload and a drop down list. Both of which have a unique name.
<form action="/add/" method="POST">
<div class="form-group">

<input type="text" name="title" class="form-control" id="add-note-title" placeholder="Title"

style="border:none;border-bottom:1px solid gray; box-shadow:none;">
</div>
<div class="form-group">
<textarea class="form-control" name="content" id="add-note-content" placeholder="Content"
rows="10" style="border:none;border-bottom:1px solid gray; box-shadow:none;"></textarea>
File: <input type="file" name="uploadfile" /> <br>
Priority: <select name="priority">
<option>---</option>
<option value="3">High</option>
<option value="2">Medium</option>
<option value="1">Low</option>
</select>
</div>
</div>
<div class="modal-footer">
<button type="button" class="btn btn-default" data-dismiss="modal">Close</button>
<input type="submit" text="submit" class="btn btn-default" />
</div>
</form>

When we are populating this HTML page, we can also populate it dynamically, without
getting bogged down by syntax, ignore templating for the while We have a variable called
Navigation and one called Categories, we loop through Categories and if the Navigation is
equal to that category then the checked value is true.

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Category:
<select name="category" class="dropdown">
<option>---</option>
{{$navigation := .Navigation}} {{$categories := .Categories}}
{{range $cat := $categories}}

<option value="{{$cat.Name}}" {{if eq $cat.Name $navigation }} checked="checked" {{end}}> {{$

{{end}}
</select>

Here we have used a drop down box, you can use radio buttons like below
<input type="radio" name="gender" value="1">Female
<input type="radio" name="gender" value="2">Male
<input type="radio" name="gender" value="3">Other

Or checkboxes
<input type="checkbox" name="gender" value="female">Female
<input type="checkbox" name="gender" value="male">Male
<input type="checkbox" name="gender" value="other">Other

We get the value of a drop down box/radio button/checkbox on the server side by using the
name field like below:
value := r.Form.Get("gender")
value := r.FormValue("gender")

As we saw earlier, our webservers basically take a HTTP Request object and return an
HTTP Response Object, below is an example of a sample HTTP Request object.
The host is the IP address sending the req, User Agent: fingerprint of the machine, the
Accept- fields define various parts like the language, encoding Referer is which IP made the
call, Cookie is the value of the cookie stored on the system and Connection is the type of
connection.
In this request snapshot, we also have a file which we upload, for file upload, the content
type is multipart/form-data
Request Header

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Host: 127.0.0.1:8081
User-Agent: ...
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:8081/
Cookie: csrftoken=abcd
Connection: keep-alive

Request Body
Content-Type: multipart/form-data;
boundary=---------------------------6299264802312704731507948053
Content-Length: 15031
-----------------------------6299264802312704731507948053
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="title"
working with forms
-----------------------------6299264802312704731507948053
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="CSRFToken"
abcd
-----------------------------6299264802312704731507948053
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="content"
finish the chapter working with forms
-----------------------------6299264802312704731507948053
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="uploadfile"; filename="2.4workingwithform.md"
Content-Type: text/x-markdown
--file content------------------------------6299264802312704731507948053
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="priority"
3
-----------------------------6299264802312704731507948053--

If you had wondered how Google's home page shows a pop up when you visit google.com
on IE of Firefox, it checks your User-Agent. The thing with HTTP request is that they can be
modified to any extent, the Chrome developer tools gives you quite sophisticated tools to
modify your requests, even User Agent spoofing is a default feature avaiable, this feature is
available so we can test our webapps in one window simulating many internet browsers at
one go.
The basic part of working with forms is to identify which user that particular form belongs to,
there are ways to attain that, we can either have a stateful or a stateless web server.

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A stateless server doesn't store sessions, it requires an authentication key for each request
while a stateful server stores sessions. For storing sessions a cookie is used, which is a file
which is stored in the private memory of the web browser which we use. Only the website
which created the cookie can access the cookie, no third party websites can access the
cookies, but the OS user can read/edit/delete cookies using the web browser.

CSRF
CSRF stands for Cross Request Site Forgery. Any website can send a POST request to
your web server, who sent the request can be found in the Referer field of your HTTP
response. It is a form of confused deputy attack in which the deputy is your web browser. A
malicious user doesn't have direct access to your website, so it makes use of your browser
to send a malicious request. Typically cookies enable your browser to authenticate itself to a
webserver, so what these malicious websites do is, they send in a HTTP request on behalf
of your browser.
We can thwart this attack by restricting the referer to your own domain, but it is quite easy to
manipulate the misspelt referer field of a HTTP request.
Another way is to use tokens. While rendering our form, we send in a hidden field with crypto
generated string of 256 characters, so when we process the POST request, we first check if
the token is valid or not and then decide if the data came from a genuine source or from a
malicious source. It doesn't have to be malicious actually, even if a legitimate user tried to
trick your webserver into accepting data, we shouldn't entertain it.
To check the csrf token, we serve the token to the form and store it in a cookie, when we get
the POST request, we check if both are equal or not. This is because a malicious person
might trick a user to click on a form but they can't set cookies for your webapplication.
A point to note here is that never trust user data. Always clean/sanitize data which you get
from the end user.
Note Javascript
If you are serious about web development, you ought to learn Javascript in detail. While
building a web app, there will be times when you would want to improve the UI of your
application, which would mean a change in the html page. Using JS is inevitable while
building beautiful webapps, while adding some new html feature, open the "web inspector"
present in the developer tools and dynamically add the html code. The web inspector allows
us to manipulate the CSS and HTML part. Now open the javascript console, that enables
you to test the JS feature which you are willing to add. For instance, in the tasks application,
there was no provision to expand/contract the size of the task, so I added a button in the
web inspector,

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<button class="toggle"></button>

In the JS console, to toggle the visibility of my .noteContent field, I did this:

$('.toggle').next().toggle()

This proved that it works, so now go to your template and actually add the code. Make sure
the html is correct because while running, the html files are parsed once, so for any html
change, you have to run the web app for each HTML change. So once the html is set up, if
you change the JS/CSS then you just have to refresh the page, because the html page gets
the JS/CSS each time the page is loaded.
As we saw in the above paragraph, for preventing CSRF, we need to generate a token and
send as a hidden field in the form and store it in a cookie, when we get the POST request
from the

Forms in Go
In the below function we set the cookie, we first generate a CSRF token, which'll be unique
for each HTTP request which we get and store it in a cookie.
//ShowAllTasksFunc is used to handle the "/" URL which is the default ons
func ShowAllTasksFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "GET" {
context := db.GetTasks("pending") //true when you want non deleted notes
if message != "" {
context.Message = message
}
context.CSRFToken = "abcd"
message = ""
expiration := time.Now().Add(365 * 24 * time.Hour)
cookie := http.Cookie{Name: "csrftoken",Value:"abcd",Expires:expiration}
http.SetCookie(w, &cookie)
homeTemplate.Execute(w, context)
} else {
message = "Method not allowed"
http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusFound)
}
}

The below handler handles the POST request sent by our form, it fetches the value of the
csrftoken cookie and gets the value of the hidden CSRFToken field of the add task form. If the
value of the cookie is equal to the value fetched by the form, then we allow it to go to the
database.

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The call to ParseForm will parse the contents of the form into Gettable fields which we can
fetch using the Get function. This call is compulsory.
//AddTaskFunc is used to handle the addition of new task, "/add" URL
func AddTaskFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "POST" {
r.ParseForm()
file, handler, err := r.FormFile("uploadfile")
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
}
taskPriority, priorityErr := strconv.Atoi(r.FormValue("priority"))
if priorityErr != nil {
log.Print("unable to convert priority to integer")
}
priorityList := []int{1, 2, 3}
for _, priority := range priorityList {
if taskPriority != priority {
log.Println("incorrect priority sent")
//might want to log as security incident
taskPriority=1 //this defaults the priority to low
}
}
title := template.HTMLEscapeString(r.Form.Get("title"))
content := template.HTMLEscapeString(r.Form.Get("content"))
formToken := template.HTMLEscapeString(r.Form.Get("CSRFToken"))
cookie, _ := r.Cookie("csrftoken")
if formToken == cookie.Value {
if handler != nil {
r.ParseMultipartForm(32 << 20) //defined maximum size of file
defer file.Close()
f, err := os.OpenFile("./files/"+handler.Filename, os.O_WRONLY|os.O_CREATE, 0666)
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
return
}
defer f.Close()
io.Copy(f, file)
filelink :=
"<br> <a href=/https/www.scribd.com/files/" + handler.Filename + ">" + handler.Filename + "</a>"
content = content + filelink
}
truth := db.AddTask(title, content, taskPriority)
if truth != nil {
message = "Error adding task"
log.Println("error adding task to db")
} else {
message = "Task added"
log.Println("added task to db")

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}
http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusFound)
} else {
log.Fatal("CSRF mismatch")
}
} else {
message = "Method not allowed"
http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusFound)
}
}

Note Cookies
Cookie is a way to store data on the browser, HTTP is a stateless protocol, it wasn't built for
sessions, basically the Internet itself wasn't built considering security in mind since initially it
was just a way to share documents online, hence HTTP is stateless, when the web server
receives requests, it can't distinguish between two consequitive requests, hence the concept
of cookies were added, thus while starting a session, we generate a session ID and store it
on the database in memory or on the database and we store the same ID on a cookie on the
web browser and we validate both of them to authenticate them.
We have to note that, if we set an expiry date for a cookie, then it is stored on the filesystem
otherwise it is stored in memory in the browser. In the incognito mode, this is the case, all
the cookies are stored in memory and not in the filesystem.
HTTP Request
Host: localhost:8080
User-Agent: .....
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1
Referer: http://localhost:8080/
Cookie: csrftoken=abcd
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

The browser, while sending a response appends all the cookie data stored in its memory or
file along with the other aspects of the HTTP request so we can access the cookie as
r.Cookie , it'll contain every cookie for that particular domain, we'd then loop through it to

fetch the data which we want. This is important for security reasons, suppose I set a cookie
on my imaginedomain.com and if it contains a csrf token and if that cookie is accessible to
some other webapp then it is horrible since they can masquerade as any legitmate user. But

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this ain't possible, since a website can only access the cookie stored for its own domain,
plus we have the feature to set HTTP only value of a cookie as true, which says that even
javascript can't access the cookies.
HTTP Response
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:43:53 GMT
Set-Cookie: csrftoken=abcd; Expires=Wed, 11 Jan 2017 16:43:53 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

When we set cookies, we write then to the HTTP response which we send to the client and
the browser reads the Cookie information and stores them in the memory or the filesystem
depending on the Expires field of the response.
From the go documentation:
type Cookie struct {
Name string
Value string
Path string // optional
Domain string // optional
Expires time.Time // optional
RawExpires string // for reading cookies only
// MaxAge=0 means no 'Max-Age' attribute specified.
// MaxAge<0 means delete cookie now, equivalently 'Max-Age: 0'
// MaxAge>0 means Max-Age attribute present and given in seconds
MaxAge int
Secure bool
HttpOnly bool
Raw string
Unparsed []string // Raw text of unparsed attribute-value pairs
}

Input Validation
The basic aspect of web applications is that no data can be trusted, even if the user isn't
malicious herself, there are many ways to trick the browser into sending HTTP requests and
fooling the web server to respond to what seems like a legitimate request. Hence we have to
verify everything that comes from the user.

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One might argue here that we do all sorts of validation using javascript, but there are ways
to evade JS validations, the simplest way is to disable JS and more sophisticated ways are
to manipulate the HTTP request before the browser sends it, it is literally trivial when we use
just the web developer tools that these days browsers provide.
if formToken == cookie.Value and title != nil and content!=nil

The title and content of the task is mandatory, hence we added the not nil part.
We do input validation when we don't want junk data to go into our database, suppose the
user hit the submit button twice, or some other scenario. But we also have to consider the
case where the user wants to run some script on our website, which is dangerous, so we
use the template.HTMLEscapeString method to escape what might run in memory of the
current browser session. Even the data which comes from your drop down list should be
validated.
Everything in a web form is sent via a Request as we saw in the above example, we use a
drop down list when we have are expecting a particular set of inputs but for someone who
knows what firefox dev tools are, can easily modify anything in the request, for example we
have the priority as drop down list we might think that since we have only three entries in the
drop down list, should we keep a check in our view handler to not accept anything but the
three values which are present in our template. We ought to keep a check like below:
priorityList := []int{1, 2, 3}
for _, priority := range priorityList {
if taskPriority != priority {
log.Println("incorrect priority sent")
//might want to log as security incident
}
}

This is the priority field of our request

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="priority"
3

All a malicious user has to do is change this value and resend the request, they can literally
insert any value here, just think what if they send rm -fr *.* and accidentally enough this
command is executed on our server. This also brings in another aspect of security, never run
your machine in root mode, always keep the root mode for admin tasks and use a non root
mode. Even if that isn't the case, a less dangerous example will be sending a huge number

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with the request, assuming that we have used integer as our variable, the program might
crash if it has to handle a number beyond its storage capacity. This might be termed as a
denial of service attack.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Basic Example
Next section: Uploading files

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Uploading files
Uploading files is the next step in form processing, in case of files, we send the entire file
data in the HTTP header, so we have to set the form encoding to enctype="multipart/formdata" . This will inform our server that we are going to get a file from the form along with the

rest of the fields, if any.

This means we can get either either file(s) and data or just file(s) or just data and no file(s).
At the first line of our HTTP handler, we have to write this line, if this line is not present in the
first line then it gives unexpected results
file, handler, err := r.FormFile("uploadfile")
if handler != nil {
r.ParseMultipartForm(32 << 20) //defined maximum size of file
defer file.Close()
f, err := os.OpenFile("./files/"+handler.Filename, os.O_WRONLY|os.O_CREATE, 0666)
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
return
}
defer f.Close()
io.Copy(f, file)
filelink := "<br> <a href=./files/"+handler.Filename+">"+ handler.Filename+"</a>"
content = content + filelink
}

We first provide the maximum size of the file which is 32 ^ 20, which is gigantic for our
webapp, not everyone has the Internet infrastructure to upload that big a file, but we want to
be flexible.
We basically get a file from the form request, in the form handler we open another file with
the same/different name and then read the file form the request and write it on the server.
We need to handle the scene where we name the file differently so we'd need to store the
old file name -> new file name relation somewhere, it can be a database table.
It is recommended to NOT keep the same name as the user, because user data can't be
trusted is the holy grail of web app development, so we need to escape the scrub the file for
malicious content/name.
We now want to randomize the file name of the files which the users upload. In your
AddTaskFunc add the following lines

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if handler != nil {
r.ParseMultipartForm(32 << 20) //defined maximum size of file
defer file.Close()
randomFileName := md5.New()
io.WriteString(randomFileName, strconv.FormatInt(time.Now().Unix(), 10))
io.WriteString(randomFileName, handler.Filename)
token := fmt.Sprintf("%x", randomFileName.Sum(nil))
f, err := os.OpenFile("./files/"+token, os.O_WRONLY|os.O_CREATE, 0666)
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
return
}
defer f.Close()
io.Copy(f, file)
filelink := "<br> <a href=/https/www.scribd.com/files/" + token + ">" + handler.Filename + "</a>"
content = content + filelink
fileTruth := db.AddFile(handler.Filename, token)
if fileTruth != nil {
message = "Error adding filename in db"
log.Println("error adding task to db")
}
}

~/Tasks/db/db.go

// AddFile is used to add the md5 of a file name which is uploaded to our application
// this will enable us to randomize the URL without worrying about the file names
func AddFile(fileName, token string) error {
SQL, err := database.Prepare("insert into files values(?,?)")
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
}
tx, err := database.Begin()
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
}
_, err = tx.Stmt(SQL).Exec(fileName, token)
if err != nil {
log.Println(err)
tx.Rollback()
} else {
log.Println(tx.Commit())
}
return err
}

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table structure
CREATE TABLE files(name varchar(1000) not null, autoName varchar(255) not null);

These block of codes does the following things:

1. Create a version of name for each uploaded file
2. Insert it in database
3. Reference the file as /files/<randomName>
4. File is now referenced by our name rather than the user supplied name
The next part to do is registering the /files/ handler.
~/Tasks/views/views.go

// UploadedFileHandler is used to handle the uploaded file related requests

func UploadedFileHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "GET" {
log.Println("into the handler")
token := r.URL.Path[len("/files/"):]
//file, err := db.GetFileName(token)
//if err != nil {
log.Println("serving file ./files/" + token)
http.ServeFile(w, r, "./files/"+token)
//}
}
}

Links
Directory
Previous section: Working with forms
Next section: Templating

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Templates
package: text/template
In the first chapter we had a cursory glance over the concept of templates. This chapter is
dedicated entirely to templates. As we said previously, a web application responds to certain
URLs and gives an html page to the browser which the browser then interprets and shows to
the end user. This html page which is sent to the browser is what is called templates in the
backend for we have a template which stores some variables, and in real time data is
provided into the template which makes it a complete html page.
Let's take a practical example. Suppose we are building a micro blogging site. We would
start with creating the front end in html. Our microblogging site will show Hi User on the
right corner.
In our static html we write this <p>Hi User</p>
But if we serve this page on our webserver it'll not change anything, it'll show Hi User , the
name of the user won't come magically, we have to put it into the page somehow, here we
use a variable so in Go we'd approach this by using a variable named {{.Name}} so our
html now will be <p>Hi {{.Name}}</p> . The . is mandatory.
Now, this is the logic we apply to all our html pages, keeping such {{}} variable expansion
parameters and serving the value of the parameter while executing the template. If you are
wondering how we'd do that, this is the syntax
homeTemplate.Execute(w, context)
//Context is the struct passed to templates
type Context struct {
Tasks []Task
Name string
Search string
Message string
}

These are the three parts of using templates, first you need to create types like we have
created the Context type, then we need to read the template, then we need to use the
components of that type in our template file. So what remains now is passing an object of
that type during template execution.
Every template requires the context object because that is what defines the data to be
populated in the template.

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Reading template:
templates, err = template.Must(template.ParseFiles(allFiles...))

Note: template.Must
Must is a helper that wraps a call to a function returning (*Template, error) and panics if the
error is non-nil Where allFiles is populated as below:
var allFiles []string
templatesDir := "./public/templates/"
files, err := ioutil.ReadDir(templatesDir)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error reading template dir")
}
for _, file := range files {
filename := file.Name()
if strings.HasSuffix(filename, ".html") {
allFiles = append(allFiles, templatesDir+filename)
}
}

For the sake of demonstration of how to parse multiple files we have used the ParseFiles
method to parse all the .html files, you can use the ParseGlob method which is available
in the standard library.
template.Must(template.ParseGlob(templatesDir + "*.html"))

The definition of ParseGlob is: func ParseGlob(pattern string) (*Template, error)

We have to specify the Pattern for the ParseGlob function, but we have passed the path and
the pattern because just passing the pattern is useless, we need the path where the pattern
will be applied to find the list of all files meeting the criteria.
Note:
1.

... operator : allFiles is a string slice and allFiles... passes the function a parameter

as a string.
2. ParseFiles performance:
There is one point to note here about performance in parsing files, typically a template
file won't change until there is some major change to the codebase so we should only
parse the files once, rather than keep this code in each view handler and doing a

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template.ParseFiles("home.html")
template.Execute(w, context)

This block of code will unnecessarily read the html page each time while serving the
response of a request, which means if ten people are using our blogging site then for
each page they visit the code will read the html page, but there is no need to do things
this way, we can read the html files once at the start and then use the Lookup method
of the template class,
homeTemplate = templates.Lookup("home.html")
homeTemplate.Execute(w, context)

Sub templating
We learnt how to pass data to templates and display it in the html page, it so happens that a
lot of code is used in all templates suppose the navigation bar or the header, then we need
not write the same chunk everywhere, we can create a template to store that, and use sub
templating {{template "_head.html" .}}
Here, we have identified a chunk of code which we want to replicate and put it in
_head.html . Then we put the above statement in each template file where we wish to have

our header. This way templates become a lot smaller and don't contain replicated code
everywhere. Do note that the . before the first } is intentional and it means that all the
variables which were passed to the current template are passed to the sub template.
The sub templates which we create depends on our requirement, but the basic point behind
it is that if we are going to repeat a block of HTML code then we should form it as a
template.
Note Using Sub Templates
The main point to note over here is that when we are going to use our templates or sub
templates, all those html files need to be parsed. The basic point in templating is that we
have a variable which stores all templates even if we aren't going to refer to that directly in
our code using the Lookup method on the template variable. The lookup method takes the
name of the template. When the {{template _head.html .}} is evaluated, it goes to our
template variable and tries to find out the template parsed with the exact name, if it is not
present then it doesn't complain by default, we should use Must method if we want it to
complain.

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Example
file views/views.go
package views
import (
"io/ioutil"
"net/http"
"os"
"strconv"
"strings"
"text/template"
)
var (
homeTemplate *template.Template
deletedTemplate *template.Template
completedTemplate *template.Template
loginTemplate *template.Template
editTemplate *template.Template
searchTemplate *template.Template
templates *template.Template
message string
//message will store the message to be shown as notification
err error
)
//PopulateTemplates is used to parse all templates present in
//the templates folder
func PopulateTemplates() {
var allFiles []string
templatesDir := "./public/templates/"
files, err := ioutil.ReadDir(templatesDir)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("Error reading template dir")
}
for _, file := range files {
filename := file.Name()
if strings.HasSuffix(filename, ".html") {
allFiles = append(allFiles, templatesDir+filename)
}
}
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
os.Exit(1)
}
templates, err = template.Must(template.ParseFiles(allFiles...))
// templates, err := template.Must(template.ParseGlob(templatesDir+".html"))
if err != nil {

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fmt.Println(err)
os.Exit(1)
}
homeTemplate = templates.Lookup("home.html")
deletedTemplate = templates.Lookup("deleted.html")
editTemplate = templates.Lookup("edit.html")
searchTemplate = templates.Lookup("search.html")
completedTemplate = templates.Lookup("completed.html")
loginTemplate = templates.Lookup("login.html")
}
//ShowAllTasksFunc is used to handle the "/" URL
//TODO add http404 error
func ShowAllTasksFunc(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.Method == "GET" {
context := db.GetTasks("pending")
//true when you want non deleted notes
if message != "" {
context.Message = message
}
homeTemplate.Execute(w, context)
message = ""
} else {
message = "Method not allowed"
http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusFound)
}
}

Looping through arrays

<div class="timeline">
{{ if .Tasks}}
{{range .Tasks}}
<div class="note">
<p class="noteHeading">{{.Title}}</p>
<hr>
<p class="noteContent">{{.Content}}</p>
</div>
{{end}}
{{else}}
<div class="note">
<p class="noteHeading">No Tasks here</p>
<p class="notefooter">Create new task<button> here </button> </p>
</div>
{{end}}
</div>

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The {{ if .Tasks}} block checks if the array is empty or not, if it is not then it'll go to the {{
.range .Tasks }} which will loop through the array, then the {{.Title}} will access the title

and {{.Content}} will access the Content of that particular Task instance and we'll see all
the tasks as a list.

Template variables
We have this scenario, we have a range of categories in the navigation drawer and if we visit
the /category/study , then our category name should be highlighted in the navigation
drawer. We do this by storing the value of the .Navigation field - which tells if it is a Edit
page/Trash page/Category page
{{$nav := .Navigation}}
{{ range $index, $cat := .Categories }}
<li class="sidebar-item">
<a href="/category/{{$cat.Name}}" {{ if eq $cat.Name $nav }} class="active" {{end}}>

<span class="nav-item"> {{$cat.Name}}</span> <span class="badge pull-right">{{$cat.Count}

</li>
{{end}}

Creating variables
{{$url := ""}} will create a blank variable, one has to not that all variables are practically

strings once they are rendered. {{$url := .Navigation}} will create a new variable and
initialize it with the value of .Navigation
For understanding why template variables are required, we need to go into the above block
of code, when we are using the range operator, we are parsing the array and the range
block gets the elements of the block by default.
My Context type is
type Context struct {
Tasks []Task
Navigation string
Search string
Message string
CSRFToken string
Categories []CategoryCount
Referer string
}

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Hence when we do a {{range .Categories}} we will be accessing each element as {{.}}

per loop. If we use any other valid variable here, like the .Navigation, then the block tries to
find the .Navigation inside .Categories, which obviously isn't present.
Now we need to make the page aware of which category it is showing, should the user go to
the /categories/ page.
The logic behind making that page category aware is that we create a CSS class to mark
that particular category as active, but for that, we'd need to access the Category name and
Navigation within the range .Categories block, thus we create two variables, one to store
the category name from the .Navigation variable and use the if statement like
{{if eq $cat $nav}} class="active" {{end}}

This will mark only that particular category as active and not all of them.
In templating logic the operator is first and then the two operands.
eq: equal, le: less than equal, ge: greater than equal
You can also use if else clause like below:
{{$url := ""}}
<div class="navbar-header">

{{if .Search}} <a class="navbar-brand"> Results for: {{.Search}}</a> {{else}} {{ if eq .Navigatio

{{ $url:="" }} {{else if eq .Navigation "completed"}} {{ $url := "" }} {{else if eq .Navigation "

{{$url := ""}} {{else if eq .Navigation "edit"}} {{$url := ""}} {{else}} {{$url := "/category"}}{
<p class="navbar-brand" href="{{$url}}/{{.Navigation}}">

{{if eq .Navigation "pending"}} Pending {{ else if eq .Navigation "completed"}}Completed {{ e

{{ else if eq .Navigation "edit"}} Edit {{else }} {{.Navigation}} {{end}} {{end}}
</p>

Here we had some complicated stuff, if our page is a search one, we had to show Results
for : <query> , pending, deleted,edit, completed for respective and /category/ if we are in

the category. So we defined an empty URL and assigned the URL values according to the
complicated if else structure.

Homework
1. Take the html pages from http://github.com/thewhitetulip/omninotesweb and modify
them to suit our purposes We would need to create one template each for the ones we
mentioned in the above variable declaration, use templating as far as possible and later

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check your results with http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks, please do the exercise on

your own first and then only check the Tasks repository.
2. Implement a search interface. Take a query as input, search tasks for that query and
return an html page with the query highlighted in the resulting page.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Uploading Files
Next section: Working with forms

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Authentication
Authentication is used to verify if the users have access to that particular part of your web
application. For understanding how to implement authentication we need to understand what
happens behind the scenes of a browser. Suppose we run a bank webapplication. We want
only our legitimate users to access our webapplication. We set up a login page and provide
our users with their username and password which they can use to validate their claim to our
webapp.
When we submit the login form, the browser takes our username, password and sends a
POST request to the webserver, which again responds with a HTTP redirect response and
we are returned to our bank dashboard.
The HTTP protocol is stateless, which means every request is unique. There is no way for
identifying automatically if a request is related to another request. This brings about the
problem of authentication, how then can we validate if the users have access to our
webapp?
We can send the username along with each HTTP request, either in the URL via a GET
request or in the POST request. But this is inefficient since for each request, the webserver
would need to hit the database to validate the username, also this would mean weak
security since if I know your username, I can impersonate you pretty easily and the
webserver is helpless to identify this impersonation.
To solve this problems Sessions were invented, sessions need to use cookies on the
browser to function. The basic idea is that the server generates a sessionID and stores it in
a cookie. With subsequent requests, the browser will send the sessionID along with the
request, the webserver will then come to know from that sessionID if the request is a fake
one or not. Also we get to know who the user is from that.

Cookies
Cookies, as we saw in a previous chapter can be used to store a key,value pair. We used a
cookie to store the CSRF token, the cookie had the name as CSRF and value as the token.
Please don't confuse sessions with cookies, because sessions aren't a key,value pair.
Sessions are a way of working with cookies on the server side. There is a gap of the entire
Internet between sessions and cookies.

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Cookies are stored in our browsers, for security reasons we need to enable the
"isHTTPOnly" field of our cookies, so only our webapplication can read the cookie.
Otherwise anyone javascript application can easily read our cookie defeating its purpose, we
might as well not keep an authentication mechanism for our webapp.
From the go documentation type Cookie struct { Name string Value string
Path string // optional
Domain string // optional
Expires time.Time // optional
RawExpires string // for reading cookies only
// MaxAge=0 means no 'Max-Age' attribute specified.
// MaxAge<0 means delete cookie now, equivalently 'Max-Age: 0'
// MaxAge>0 means Max-Age attribute present and given in seconds
MaxAge int
Secure bool
HttpOnly bool
Raw string
Unparsed []string // Raw text of unparsed attribute-value pairs
}

The domain of our cookie enables a restricted access to our cookie. A visitor goes to our
fictional bank website, sbank.com and enters a username and password, a cookie is stored
in the browser which only the sbank.com domain can access since we are security aware
and we have set the HttpOnly field to true while setting the cookie. This means some
malicious website which is set up by an attacker to intentionally target our bank isn't able to
access the cookie using javascript.
One has to remember that cookie is nothing but a file stored in a user's browser, if can be
accessed over HTTP by our webserver, a client browser does allow access to it through
browser settings or custom javascript. The browser, after all is a platform, and we have APIs
to that platform.

Sessions
A session is a series of actions performed between you and the webapp you are acting,
enabled by the browser and the Internet you are using. While generating a new session, we
need to check if a sessions is already active, if so we return the same session ID rather than
create a new one, if not, we generate a new session ID. Session IDs need to be sufficiently
random. Of course we can't generate something totally random, but we have to ensure to
generate something that nobody else can replicate, unless they have access to our private
key which we use to generate our random number.

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login/logout reset password sessions token based authentication store session in database
not memory

Links
Directory
Previous section: Templates
Next section: Working with files

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Files
JSON and XML are two of the most common ways to transmit data between web
applications. We'll use JSON for our configuration file.
For our webapplication we have a set of configuration values like the server port where our
application will run. Suppose you are developing your application in $GOPATH and also
using it somewhere else, then you can't run them in parallel because both sources use the
same port number. Naturally we want a way to parameterize that port number. The
parameter or configuration value list may contain more things like database connection
information. As of now we will use a config.json file and read the serverPort variable and
bind our server on that port.
Our configuration file uses a fixed structure, hence it is simple enough to UnMarshal it to a
struct type, we can use some advance concepts to accomodate unstructured JSON files,
because that is the whole point of JSON, we can have data in an unstructured format.
NoSQL has been famous lately, they are basically JSON document stores. We have projects
like boltdb which store data in a key value pair, ultimately in flat files or in memory.
file: $GOPATH/src/github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/config/config.go

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package config
import (
"encoding/json"
"io/ioutil"
"log"
)
// Stores the main configuration for the application
// define a struct object containing
type Configuration struct {
ServerPort string
}
var err error
var config Configuration
// ReadConfig will read the config.json file to read the parameters
// which will be passed in the config object
func ReadConfig(fileName string) Configuration {
configFile, err := ioutil.ReadFile(fileName)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal("Unable to read log file")
}
//log.Print(configFile)
err = json.Unmarshal(configFile, &config)
if err != nil {
log.Print(err)
}
return config
}

file: $GOPATH/src/github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/config.json
{
"ServerPort": ":8081"
}

file: $GOPATH/src/github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks/main.go
values := config.ReadConfig("config.json")
// values is the object now, we can use the
// below statement to access the port name
values.ServerPort

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We use the json.Unmarshal to read the JSON file into our structure object. This is a very
simple and basic example of parsing JSON files, you can have nested structures of many
levels inside the main config object, but that is the features of Go, so long as it can be
represented as a JSON document you can use the Unmarshal method to translate the file
into an object which you can use in your program.
Homework
Alter the config.json file to take the name of the sqlite database as a configuration
parameter.
Read about the JSON library in godoc

Links
Directory
Previous section: Working with forms
Next section: Routing

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Routing
Till now we used routing directly inside of our handlers. For a large application though, it'd be
better to have a router in place. We can either use a third party one with countless features
or the standard mux.
As our application matures, routing plays a big role into it. We intentionally avoided routing
till now because as a web developer, we must understand what happens in the background
of our application. Web frameworks allow us to build applications quickly, but the downside
of them is that they provide us with a framework as the name suggests, which means you
are totally restricted by the API which the framework will provide. Thus we need to know how
to implement bare bone stuff, so in future we might want to modify the framework we need,
or rather create our own one.
First of all we'd need to install the httprouter, do a go get -u
github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter

From the documentation

Package httprouter is a trie based high performance HTTP request router.

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package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter"
"net/http"
"log"
)
func Index(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, _ httprouter.Params) {
fmt.Fprint(w, "Welcome!\n")
}
func Hello(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, ps httprouter.Params) {
fmt.Fprintf(w, "hello, %s!\n", ps.ByName("name"))
}
func main() {
router := httprouter.New() // creates a new router
router.GET("/", Index) // will direct the GET / request to the Index function

router.GET("/hello/:name", Hello) // will redirect the GET /name to Hello, stores the name of the
// in the a variable of httprouter.Params
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", router))
}

httprouter uses a custom Http.HandleFunc method to accomodate parameterized routing.

Here, we can route our requests depending on the HTTP method through which it is used,
and we can handle parameterized routing for free.
To handle that scenario we were initially using the r.URL.Path variable and then extracting
the parameters, it is just the solution of finding the variable parameter of the URL, there is a
wide area where httprouter is awesome, there is no need to handle the / for each requests.
In web applications sometimes having a forward slash is very critical, the URL index is totally
different from /index and is marginally different from /index/ httprouter takes care of the
trailing slashes. The Go default MUX requires you to handle the routes in the descending
order, meaning the most generic URL the "/" should be at the bottom and the least generic
should be at the top, as it goes sequentially up and down matching the URLs, httprouter
provides a wide variety of advantages when it comes to routing.
This is because our application should separate routing from the handler logic, we were
mixing it just to get a feel for how to program in Go, but eventually when the app grows, it is
tiresome and non maintainable for doing the if r.Method==POST check in each handler,

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rather than that we can have 3 different handlers one for when request comes via AJAX, one
for normal GET and one for normal POST. This way we do not have one function handler
checking the type of request and then writing three separate logic inside one function.
But that doesn't mean we have to use httprouter, if in an app there aren't much sophisticated
routing required then we can use the default Mux since it is good enough, but if we have
complicated routing then httprouter is the best.
Homework
Read the httprouter documentation and source code to get a deeper understanding of
routers, since routers are an integral part of any web application. Then rewrite our
application using the httprouter.

Links
Directory
Previous section: Working with files
Next section: Advance topics

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1.

Contributors

137