"Spelling Service"

-Programming Exercise- Version 1.5 Implementation by John Bedworth, April 2016

The goal is to implement a very simple HTTP web service that provides a RESTFUL spell-checking API on port 8080 that determines if a word is "misspelled" or not; and if it is, give some spelling suggestions.

In this example app, I'm using Rails 5.0.0.beta 3 and Ruby 2.3.0. Rails 5 has a light-weight solution for implementing RESTFUL web services. This app demonstrates some of these features.

INSTALLATION

Unpacking

1. Unzip john-bedworth-spellchecker.zip or pull this down from github (https://github.com/jbedworth/spellchecker) into a place where you would normally run ruby on rails projects on your *nix box.

    unzip john-bedworth-spellchecker.zip -d ~/projects/
    cd ~/projects/spellchecker
   

   or

    cd ~/projects/
    git clone https://github.com/jbedworth/spellchecker.git
   

Environment Setup

As noted, this is a Ruby 2.3, Rails 5, PostgreSQL application. If your a Rails Developer, a lot of this is probably all ready set up, or second nature for you. Including it here for completeness.

1. For best results, use rbenv or rvm to configure your environment for Ruby 2.3. I personally use rbenv for many reasons, not the least of which is that it's light weight and doesn't make heavy-handed changes to your machine. For me, it's a combination of habit and preference. Installation instructions for rbenv can be found at https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv

    rbenv install 2.3.0
   

2. Verify you're running 2.3 in this project's directory by typing:

    cd ~/projects/spellchecker
    ruby --version
   

3. Ensure RubyGems is up to date

    gem update --system
   

4. Install Rails 5 beta 3. This would happpen anyway when we do bundle install, but doing it now gives us the opportunity to skip documentation, which is faster.

    gem install rails --version=5.0.0.betat3 --no-ri --no-rdoc
    rbenv rehash
   

5. I used postgres for the back-end, which is pretty standard for typical Rails apps. If you don't all ready have a server, we need to set up postgres binaries. Using Homebrew on MacOSX makes this pretty easy. If you don't have Homebrew set up, you can install it here: http://brew.sh/

    brew update
    brew install postgresql
    mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents
    ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/postgresql/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
    launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist
    initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
    createdb `whoami`
   

   This should set up and get your local database running, more or less. On some environments (Ubuntu) You might have to install the dev libs and tools by hand to get this working and rails wired in. I usually have to fiddle with this part to get it perfect, but on MacOSX with HomeBrew, my PostgreSQL setup was a dream right out of the box. It was almost scary how seamless it was.

   Let me know if you have any issues and I'll try to help you out (especially if your on Ubuntu or "gasp" Windows). A good article that I've found useful is: https://www.codefellows.org/blog/three-battle-tested-ways-to-install-postgresql

That's it, at this point you should have a genuine development enviornment capable of running any Rails 5/Postgres app. On to the fun part!

Application Installation

1. Make sure you are in the root of the project directory.

    cd ~/projects/spellchecker
   

2. Gem installation time. Run your typical bundle install command.

    bundle install
   

3. Set up the database that holds our dictionary.

    rails db:create
    rails db:migrate
    rails db:seed
   

4. Go get some coffee. db:seed is loading over 100,000 entries into our dictionary table from the interwebz.

5. Time to start the server. No, really, that's it. If you are running this on a dev-box, it's really just unpack the project, setup and seed the database, and run the server.

    rails server
   

   You can include the -p 8080 if you want to, but it's not necessary since the instructions stated that 8080 should be the default port. I configured the server properly to run on, yep, 8080. Note that this causes Heroku no end of issues, so I don't recommend deploying to "production" like this.

RUN AND TEST THE SERVICE

1. Point your browser to the app and have fun!

    http://localhost:8080/spellling/House
   

   Or use curl.

    curl http://localhost:8080/spelling/$word=House
    curl http://localhost:8080/spelling/House
   

2. You can run my all of unit and integration tests here:

    rails test
   

SUMMARY

That's it, pretty straightforward and standard "install and run a Rails app" stuff.

For the record, I had a fantastic time coming up with a solution to this project, and had even more fun coding it up. I really wanted to figure out a way to leverage the power of SQL to handle the dictionary instead of inventing a bunch of data structures and complicated logic, and I'm really happy tha this approach worked out.

Again, thank you!

John Bedworth