Everyone should have their own personal URL shortener, shouldn't they?
I figured that this wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to write. And, indeed, the core functionality didn't take much more time than that. But then we start designing our way round the shortcuts and quick-and-dirty hacks we've used to "get things going quickly", writing unit-tests and comments explaining our thinking, adding some JSP pages so that we can exercise the whole mess, brewing a couple of batches of beer in between times... let's just leave it at a little bit longer!
Why?
Indeed! Why would anybody want Their Very Own Personal URL Shortener?
First: I don't really trust all the "cloudy" hype going around right now. For a start, I have no good reason to trust bit.ly, is.gd, goo.gl or any of the other several-dozen public shorteners. Not that I have much reason to distrust them, but really, I don't know them or the people behind them from a bar of soap. And why should I, like a sheep, participate in generating value[1] for someone who gives me little or nothing in return aside from a shorter, opaque URL that requires an extra network round-trip? And let's not forget that these entities have a nasty tendency to vanish, sometimes rather abruptly. Companies get bought and the acquiring company borgs the product, or sees no value in it, or any of a thousand other corpthink accidents may happen.
Then, too, what sort of assurance do I have that I'll ever be able to get my data (and if I shorten a reference, it's my reference) out of their service ever again? Granted that Google does make some effort in that direction (or at least nods benignly while their engineers do it), but, like the actions of the kakistocracy throughout history, things are only good until a single bad apple rots the barrel.
Second: I don't have PHP deployed on my servers and have no wish to add to the system-administration burden I already have to deal with, so I distinctly want something written in Java...
Third: A whole lot of the URL-shortening services out there don't give any analytics. At least not of those that I can self-host. I think that the analytics angle is compelling. Conventional web analytics - like Google Analytics - are only accessible to the people who created and host the content under analysis. They know where their audience came from, when and how, but nobody else does. If I refer people to some web-stuff[2] I'd like to get an idea of how many people I influenced - how many people followed my recommendation. It is a measure of my own reputation and influence, so highly personal[3]. URL-shorteners give us a way to measure, with a reasonable degree of accuracy and assurance, the influence we have in persuading others to follow our webby blatherings.
I will confess that Google's shortening service is pretty good, and has some nice-ish analytics, but I still think it's in our own best interest to keep at least some stuff out of Google's (or anybody's) mitts. Just on general principles.
An Unexpected Bonus
As it turns out, this is a really, really nice project to use for teaching a JSP/Servlet course, so I'll be reversing it into my Java web-dev course. It covers all the principles I like to get across, from container-managed security through session management and clever use of error-pages, to exploiting the underlying infrastructure properly (instead of hoping that some crapulatious web framework will substitute for your own lack of knowledge or understanding.)
Where?
I'll be releasing the code under the GNU Affero General Public License (probably via Google Code). Just have some tidying-up to do first (like getting license notices in place.) The first deployment is very feature incomplete - there's quite a bit I'd still like to add to the app - and some downright dodgy implementation details that need replacing in time, but for now its working for me.
Drop me a line if you're desperate to have it work for you and can't wait...
[1] At least I assume they get some value out of hosting their shorteners, otherwise why would they do it?
[2] I despise the word "content", despite using it quite frequently.
[3] And, YES, ego-gratifying[4].
[4] Or ego-destroying, as the case may be.
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