Welcome to Learn HTTP Servers
In a way, this course is where everything you've learned so far on the Boot.dev back-end track comes together. Building HTTP servers is the bread-and-butter of a backend developer's day-to-day work.
This course assumes you already have a solid understanding of Go. If you don't, take a step back and take our Go course.
Goals of This Course
- Understand what web servers are and how they power real-world web applications
- Build a production-style HTTP server in Go, without the use of a framework
- Use JSON, headers, and status codes to communicate with clients via a RESTful API
- Learn what makes Go a great language for building fast web servers
- Use type safe SQL to store and retrieve data from a Postgres database
- Implement a secure authentication/authorization system with well-tested cryptography libraries
- Build and understand webhooks and API keys
- Document the REST API with markdown
What Is a Server?
A web server is just a computer that serves data over a network, typically the Internet. Servers run software that listens for incoming requests from clients. When a request is received, the server responds with the requested data.
Any server worth its salt can handle many requests at the same time. In Go, we use a new goroutine for each request to handle them concurrently. Let's start by practicing with goroutines.
Assignment
In this course, we'll be working on a product called "Chirpy". Chirpy is a social network similar to Twitter.
One of Chirpy's servers is processing requests unbelievably slowly. Use a goroutine to fix the bug in the handleRequests (not handleRequest) function. The server should be able to process all the requests within the time limit.