cataclyst23 / news-task

Small web application task implemented with Go.

Homework task

The task

Using any language/framework you desire, retrieve news items from the GetNewsForApp endpoint and create a web page to display them on-screen.

Here is an example of this endpoint's use: http://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v0002/?appid=570&count=4&maxlength=400&format=json

Tech stack

• Server/client functionality: Golang (v1.21.3) with net/HTTP and html(text)/template packages
• CSS/JS Toolkit: Bootstrap
• Unit tests: Go testing package
• GitHub Actions workflow for building and running the tests when something gets pushed to master

Build and run the server

To start the application, run go run cmd/main.go, or build using go build cmd/main.go then start the binary. The app can be accessed on http://localhost:8080 by default.

Tests

To execute all the unit tests manually, run go test -v ./....

Sidenotes

Initially I went with the html/template package but ended up switching to the text/template one due to the Steam API response containing HTML-formatted content, which the html/template package escapes. This way the response can be displayed in its originally formatted way.

Possible next steps

The number of unit tests could be extended with the use of ginkgo and gomega frameworks. The lists within the returned news-components could be parsed and displayed like actual list items using the tags in square brackets.