Bitly-Clone

Introduction

As a Java web-app, this is a simplied clone to the famous Bitly (https://bitly.com) service. The main function is:

Given an input url, create a 'shortened' url that will redirect a user to the original content.

Purpose

To demostracte my java programming level and software engineering abaility, since this is originally a task from a technical test.

The following de-faco standard technologies were used for demostration purpose:

• [Spring Framework] - for dependency injection and restful controller
• [Hibernate] - for ORM
• [Log4j2] - for logging
• [JUnit] - for unit testing
• [JMock] - for mocking at unit testing

Installation

1. deploy the bitly-clone.war to the servlet container
2. create the config file: file:${catalina.home}/conf/bitly.properties

properties:

• bitly.domainUrl - the base url of the bitly-clone war deployed
• bitly.hashMethod - Hash method for shortening the url, see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/security/MessageDigest.html#getInstance(java.lang.String)

example:

bitly.domainUrl=https://bitly-clone
bitly.hashMethod=MD5

Restful API

list all shortened urls

method: GET
path: /list
requestbody: none
responsebody: json list to show all shortened urls

example response:

[
{
  "originalUrl" : "http://apple.com/123/123",
  "shortenUrl": "https://bitly-clone.com/4999af664c462fb0c4edfc2171da1f9b"
  "date":1460919344891
},
{
  "originalUrl" : "http://test.test.test.test.test.com",
  "shortenUrl": "https://bitly-clone.com/4999af67812k2fb0c4e12ee671da1fff"
  "date":1460919345892
}
]

create a shortened url

method: POST
path: /
requestbody: raw string of the original url to be inputed
responsebody: json object contains the shortened url along with the original url

example response:

{
  "originalUrl" : "http://apple.com/123/123",
  "shortenUrl": "https://bitly-clone.com/4999af664c462fb0c4edfc2171da1f9b"
}

redirect url

method: GET
path: /{shortened url}
responseheader: http 301 status would response with location equals the original url 

Known Issues

As a demostraction, the following issues are not going to be solved, but I know thier existence.

• The hash of the shortened url may be collided
• It is supposed to shortened only GET request
• http-to-https or https-to-http problem