Creating an HTTP Server Using Gin

What is an HTTP server?

HTTP is the protocol that's used to serve most of the content on the web. There are a few components involved in this process:

• Client: This is the software that's used to access services made available by the server, such as the web browser.

• Server: This is a piece of software that can process HTTP requests and return a response.

• Endpoint or API Endpoint: This is the path exposed by the server to perform a specific operation on the resource being served.

• Handler: These are usually the functions used to handle calls directed to an endpoint.

Let's try to write a simple server in Go that receives a ping request and sends back a response to its caller.

Creating an HTTP server without any framework

We'll start with a very simple request, which doesn't involve processing any query or path parameter. For this, we'll directly use Go's built-in net/http package. This package provides a basic server and client implementation.

In the below code snippet, we have tried to implement a ping endpoint for our server: