Go: Building Web Applications

Chapter 3. Three Ways to Implement Profile Pictures

So far, our chat application has made use of the OAuth2 protocol to allow users to sign in to our application so that we know who is saying what. In this chapter, we are going to add profile pictures to make the chatting experience more engaging.

We will look at the following ways to add pictures or avatars alongside the messages in our application:

• Using the avatar picture provided by the authentication server
• Using the Gravatar.com web service to look up a picture by the user's e-mail address
• Allowing the user to upload their own picture and host it themselves

The first two options allow us to delegate the hosting of pictures to a third party—either an authentication service or Gravatar.com—which ...