URL Shorteners

• What?
• Requirements
• The URL Shortener
• API
• Implementations

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.

Implementations

• Clojure
• CoffeeScript
• Elixir
• Go
• gRPC (Ruby -> Go)
• Haskell
• JavaScript
• JavaScript (ES6)
• Python
• Ruby
• Scala

In-progress

• C
• Erlang
• Rust