enygmator / rsurl

A URL Shortener (+ Web app) with Rust backend & ASP.NET Core 6 Blazor Server C# UI

rsurl

This is project is aimed at creating a URL shortening service.
rsurl stands for rusty-short-url.

We DO NOT use any 3rd paty API and all frameworks/libraries used are open-source and can be substituted with closed source versions (since they are all MIT Licensed - almost?).

Overview

I shall use this file for temporary documentation

The requirements

• URL shortener service
• custom rsurl
• store in DB
• statistics obtain (backend)
• display statistics (frontend)
• provide possible mobile app using MAUI

Hackathon Actual SRS

1. Basics: UI alignment, basic hygiene, usability and more
2. Signup/Login experience: Would you have a login/signup experience? How would one sign up? E-Mail and password? What is your favorite sign-in method?
3. URL Management: Can a user edit a shortened URL? What can they edit? Can it be deleted? Can users choose a custom short URL string?
4. Statistics: Can you present a Geographical breakup of URL access? What devices and browsers are being used to access the URL? What is the screen size? Mode info?
5. Exceptions: Server can be down; user can lose internet connectivity, what else?

The above-mentioned are just examples and is not a comprehensive list.

Architecture

The service "backend"

speed reference

The shortening service need to be super-fast and is therefore built on a systems programming language called Rust; which has speeds as fast as C, but everything else is as elegant as Java or Python.

There are lots of other reasons as to why I chose RUst (package manager, highly secure, ...)

Link

Bitly (largest URL Shortening) shortens 600 million links per month.

Bitly links cannot be changed once created.

I will Use HTTP 301 moved permanently redirect for those links that people don't intend to ever change (These redirections are meant to last forever).
It makes more sense to have a new URL point to another location than edit a previous one.

maybe users can set expiration time

A custom URL may be chosen. People can edit and delete redirects if they want - but for that, they'll have to choose that option beforehand, which will lead to a HTTP 302 moved temporarily redirect.

Mozilla has good documentation.

I'm assuming that multiple sURLs can point to the same URL and therefore the sURL will be randomly generated.

Storage

I'm using key-value store for the shortened URLs.

I'm using key-value store for user data.

We'll assume we have 1 billion links per month; we'll operate for 10 years = 120 billion links.
Therefore, URL with length 7, will give 64^7 = ~5 Trillion URLs.

Why MongoDB

It is more than a simple key-value store database, but we'll use it as one.

I thought of using redis as an in-memory cache, but it seems like mongoDB is a FREE key-value store that has this caching feature inbuilt. So, the latency of read-miss is reduced as it's implemented internally.

I'm not sure if it's open source as the server is open source on GitHub, but I don't know if that's the whole of it. As far as I can see, it is open source with a custom license.

I'm using a columnar store for analytics.

Analytics

• country
• browser
• user-agent
• device
• screen size
• mode info
• HTTP Request type
• datetime
• language
• referrer

The UI "frontend"

For this, I chose C# because it is elegant to write code in it. The web framework I'm using is called ASP.NET Core 6 Blazor Server, which is a webserver in C# that uses C# both on the client and the server and is implemented in such a way so as to offer the best live update experience possible. It is an enterprise-level open source framework from Microsoft that's meant to scale well (among other things).

C# is technically slower that rust (being a compiled language), but we can live with that as the UI need not be as fast as the service itself.

This framework is actually about 5 to 10 times faster than javascript and python based web frameworks (since C# is statically compiled). The first time load time seems to be slow, but after that, it is super-fast.

Product design Decisions

There are a lot of reasons I architected this app the way I did:

1. Blazor server: realtime connection, transient service = network load optimization; best diff based sync - multi-device (global) sync; same codebase for cross-platform mobile apps; faster than JS/python.

2. Rust + : secure; as fast as C; like Java/C#/python

3. Base62 is used because: it most commonly used; higher encoding creates characters that might be interpreted as something other than string.

4. Link traffic: -

Extensibility

Mobile apps

Using dotNET MAUI (open-source, enterprise supported, cross-platform app framework from Microsoft), we have a version of this website for the app.

This DOES NOT mean that there will be a webview which will show the website, but rather, it'll be like electron, but much faster.

All the components of the website can be reused inside the cross-platform app, guaranteeing a single code base and nearly full re-usability.