Creating a URL shortening service with Zotonic

Introduction

over the course of the following days/weeks, I will walk you through creating a URL shortening service with Zotonic, the Erlang web framework. For this tutorial I chose building a URL shortening service because:

1. It's cool to have your own service... spice up your tweets with your customized urls :)
2. More importantly, creating such a service is a well-defined topic which touches on a lot of different subjects, and it can be gradually extended.

This tutorial is divided into a series of articles.

1. Part 1: setting up Zotonic, creating an empty site, running it and poke into Zotonic's belly using the Erlang shell.
2. Part 2: defining the data model for the redirection service in an erlang module.
3. Part 3: creating a dispatch rule for the short URLS and the webmachine resource for handling the redirect.
4. Part 4: creating the homepage: a form to create a shortened URL, and a JSON API to let external apps create URLs as well.
5. Part 5: adding a tab in the admin to show the created urls.
6. Part 6: allowing users to sign up and log in to manage their created URLs, view stats, etc.

Source code

After the first article has been published, you can find the source code online on github. For every article, I'll tag the repository so you can keep track of what has been added and changed.

That's it for now. See you back soon for part one: Setting up the Zotonic site.