In this chapter, we exposed the data for our social polling solution through a highly scalable RESTful API and built a simple website that consumes the API to provide an intuitive way for users to interact with it. The website consists of static content only, with no server-side processing (since the API does the heavy lifting for us). This allows us to host the website very cheaply on static hosting sites, such as bitballoon.com, or distribute the files to content delivery networks.

Within our API service, we learned how to share data between handlers without breaking or obfuscating the handler pattern from the standard library. We also saw how writing wrapped handler functions allows us to build a pipeline of functionality in a very simple and intuitive way.

We wrote some basic encoding and decoding functions that –while only simply wrapping their counterparts from the encoding/json package for now –could be improved later to support a range of different data representations without changing the internal interface to our code. We wrote a few simple helper functions that make responding to data requests easy while providing the same kind of abstraction that would allow us to evolve our API later.

We saw how, for simple cases, switching to HTTP methods is an elegant way to support many functions for a single endpoint. We also saw how, with a few extra lines of code, we are able to build support for CORS in order to allow applications running on different domains to interact with our services –without the need for hacks such as JSONP.

In the next chapter, we will evolve our API and web skills to build a brand new startup app called Meander. We'll also explore an interesting way of representing enumerators in a language that doesn't officially support them.