Lander

The idea

A URL shortener has always been on my list of things I'd like to write myself. It's simple, yet useful.

for our Algorithms & Datastructures 3 class, we had to implement three different tries (Patricia trie, ternary trie, and a custom one). Considering these are efficient string-based search trees, this gave me the idea to use it as the backend for a URL shortener!

This implementation currently uses a ternary trie as its search tree. The persistence model is very simple; I simply append a line to a text file every time a URL is added, and add the lines of this file to the trie on startup. The trie is stored completely im memory, and no I/O operations are required when requesting a redirect. This makes the server very fast.

The name

I gave up giving my projects original names a long time ago, so now I just use the names of my friends ;p