Book Image

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

By : Chang Sau Sheong
Book Image

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby

By: Chang Sau Sheong

Overview of this book

Most users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don’t fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet's most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book’s main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Designing the clone


Cloning TinyURL is relatively simple but there is some thought behind the design of the application. We will be building a clone of TinyURL called Tinyclone, which will be hosted at the domain http://tinyclone.saush.com.

Creating a short URL for each long URL

The domain of the short URL is fixed. What's left is the file pathname. We need to represent the long URL with a unique file pathname (a key), one for each long URL. This means we need to persist the relationship between the key and the URL.

One of the ways we can associate the long URL with a unique key is to hash the long URL and use the resulting hash as the unique key. However, the resulting hash might be long and hashing functions could be slow.

The faster and easier way is to use a relational database's auto-incremented row ID as the unique key. The database will help ensure the uniqueness of the ID. However, the running row ID number is base 10. To represent a million URLs would already require seven characters...