Shorty is an API that shortens urls. It does this by String hashing the url and saving this all in an in-memory database. The reason I chose an in-memory database over a database like MySql was to reduce complexity and maximize developer workflow speed. This API is built on top of Java Spring including Persistence, RestController, and tests.

In order to run this API locally on your machine run mvn spring-boot:run on the command line. This will start the app on port 8000 locally. you can then visit http://localhost:8000 to see the index page of the api.

There are unit tests written for each route of the controller. In order to run the tests you can run mvn test.

If you would like to add a short link to Shorty's database go to http://localhost:8000/create?url=google.com. This action will create a short link and save it to the in-memory database. Click the link to get redirected to your url.

To get redirected to your newly created link, visit http://localhost:8000/myHash. This will redirect you to your original url.

If you would like to enter custom urls to be redirected, you can by visiting http://localhost:8000/custom?url=google.com&custom=my-custom-link.

Unfortunately because of the roughly 4 hour time constraint on this project, I couldn't complete several things I would have liked to. Here are improvements that can be made:

• Use Mysql instead of an in memory database to mimic a production environment
• Change the data model to allow redirection from custom short links. Currently only redirects are possible from autogenerated hash values and this is because of how the data model is represented. Hash being the key we search on, we should combine the concept of hash and custom so that we can have many custom values mapped to a single url and all of them will get redirected.

I decided to use Spring Boot in order to get this up and running quickly. Spring Boot is a great framework that allows you to run quality apps quickly. The customization is endless but the "Autowiring" of components makes it really easy to write a REST API. I'm also familiar with this framework and enjoy working with it a lot. The database is an in-memory Hibernate database. This was chosen for ease of use and fast development.