URL Shorteners
What?
I want to learn more languages. Mostly, I'm interested in:
- Learning the basics and best practices of the language
- How to structure a project, and development workflow
- Testing, and tools that help a TDD cycle
- Deployability to Heroku
Requirements
This is what I think the example project needs:
- Uses HTTP
- Has some sort of write workload
- Requires storage/state that can remain in-memory
- Straightforward to test
- Benchmarkable, if I choose to do that at some point
The URL Shortener
I need something interesting to build, but not too complex that it would take a long amount of time or result in immense frustration. I think a URL shortener is a good compromise of the requirements above.
API
GET /
302 Redirect to this page
GET /shorten?url=[url]
Create a new short URL, and respond with 201 Created along with the path to
the token as the body (ex: /abc123).
Each shorten request will create a new token, regardless if it already exists as another token (mostly for simplicity and performance).
Ideally, we would URL-decode and validate the URL, but I'm not concerned with
this to start. For now, it should respond with 400 Bad Request if the url is
blank.
GET /:token
302 Redirect to the full URL, or 404 Not Found if the token was not found.