Chapter 7. Serving and receiving assets and forms
This chapter covers
- Serving static files such as those needed to view a website
- Handling HTML forms, including file uploads
- Working with raw multipart messages
If you think about it, the original web service was serving files. This is what was first created back in 1991 when the web began. The interaction we enjoy today wasn’t there at the beginning. When interaction came, it did so through web forms. These constructs, created decades ago, are still synonymous with the modern web and foundational to modern web applications.
This chapter starts by presenting methods to serve static files for your Go application. Because Go is a web server, rather than running behind a web server such as Apache or Nginx, you need to set up how you want files such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, images, or other files to be served. You’ll learn several ways to store and serve files that provide solutions for varying applications.
From there, we move into form handling. Form handling with Go may seem fairly straightforward, and for simple cases it is. Yet, cases such as handling files as multipart form data can require tapping into parts of Go not often touched or understood. This is especially true if you want to work with large files.