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Anagrams Server w/ Basic Requests

Summary

This challenge will take the concepts of the anagrams basic challenge from phase one, and migrate it into a web application.

It is going to introduce the basic web request and response cycle. It will be your first exposure to Sinatra, a Domain Specific Language that we will use to teach you about web application development.

After this challenge you should have a clear understanding of:

  • How a client request is processed by the server.
  • How a server builds a response.
  • What the response looks like after returned to the client.

New Technology/Concept

  • Sinatra

    • We will be adding the Sinatra Gem to our project. Sinatra is a DSL that will help us build our basic web applications throughout phase 2

  • cURL

    • curl is a CLI client to get documents/files from a server.

Releases

Release 0: Your First Web Server

In the source directory of the challenge create a file named Gemfile

$ cd <path>/anagrams-server-basic-requests/source
$ touch Gemfile

In the Gemfile set the source to https://rubygems.org and add the sinatra gem

#Gemfile

source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'sinatra'

Run Bundle install

$ bundle install

In the same directory create another file called index.rb

$ touch index.rb

In the index.rb file require sinatra and create a get route to the root directory. Inside the route return a response with the plain text 'Anagrams Server'

#index.rb
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
	'Anagrams Server'
end

Next up use ruby to execute the index.rb file and watch what happens.

$ ruby index.rb
[2015-03-15 21:35:12] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2015-03-15 21:35:12] INFO  ruby 2.1.1 (2014-02-24) [x86_64-darwin12.0]
== Sinatra/1.4.5 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from WEBrick
[2015-03-15 21:35:12] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=6685 port=4567

Congratulations! You've just created your first web server. Now let's try it out.

Using the curl command in the terminal make a client request to the root directory of your local host using port 4567.

$ curl localhost:4567
$ Anagrams Server

Release 1: Import a Dictionary

OS X comes with its own big-ass™ dictionary. Try running this from the command line:

$ cat /usr/share/dict/words # outputs the contents of the file to STDOUT
$ wc -w /usr/share/dict/words # counts the number of words in the file
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep violin # find any lines that include the string violin
$ grep violin < /usr/share/dict/words # same as above, but without using `cat`

What does the -w option for wc command do? How does wc -w differ from wc -l? If you're curious what else wc can do, try reading the __man__ual page for wc by running man wc. Tip: You can quit the man program with q.

Copy /usr/share/dict/words into your application directory.

We're copying the file into our application directory because in the world where we deploy the application to a server or someone else installs the application on their computer we want each instance to have the same dictionary, not whatever dictionary happens to be on the machine.

Release 2: Create Route to find Anagrams

Now create a new get route '/anagrams' that will take a parameter called 'word', create a list of possible anagrams, and search the word file in your application directory for all matching words.

Store each of the matched anagrams in a collection and return them in the response from the server to the client in a comma separated string.

Now use the curl command to test your application

$ curl localhost:4567?word=hello
$hello,helol,hello,helol,hlole,hlole,holel,holle,holel,holle,eholl,eholl,ellho,ellho,lhole,lehol,lleho,lohel,lhole,lehol,lleho,lohel,ohell,ohell,ollhe,ollh

Release 4: Add Error Handling

Finally reference the Sinatra docs in the Return Values section. Explore the possibility of returning an Internal Server Error Code, with a message.

Now if the user request uses a word that has no anagrams. Build a response with the internal server error, and return a message that says "No Anagrams Found for #{word}"

Conclusion

Based off what you've discovered you should be comfortable with how you can send a request to a server, parse some parameters, and build a response to the client. Great Job!