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 auth service
• Using the https://en.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 authorization service or https://en.gravatar.com/ which is great because it reduces the cost of hosting our application (in terms of storage costs and bandwidth, since the user's browsers will actually download the pictures from the servers of the authenticating...