summer-of-code-2023

DevClub Summer of Code 2023

Backend Development: Week 1

Task 1A: Network Report

This will be your first task. Explore how Moodle and write your findings in a report. You’ll be using the browser developer tools to make the network report. In your report, write about

• What are the different requests made by the browser to the server, and where are they initiated inside the page
• What each header in the response from the server means
• What happens when you login to Moodle. (Explain how the browser makes a request to the server and how the server responds to the request.)
• What are the cookies and how are they used in the browser-server communication and authentication.

Finally, create a file in this repo as backend/week1/report.md and write your findings, make sure to insert screenshots wherever you can!

Bonus Task

• Check out tools like telnet/nc, curl, wget and learn how to make requests to these servers
• Check out how JWTs are used for authentication. Explore any of the daily websites you visit/APIs you use and see if they are using JWT for authentication, and see what information they store

Task 1B: Create a URL Shortner

In this task you have to make a URL shortner using Python simple HTTP server. The following should be the features of your URL shortner:

• A redirect endpoint which takes a shortened URL and redirects to the original URL.
  GET /redirect/<short_code should return a response with header HTTP 302 Found

• A create endpoint which takes a URL and returns a shortened URL. POST /create/<short_code>/<destination_url> should return a response with header HTTP 201 Created

We would recommend you to initially start with setting up a simple server which can return any arbitrary header and content for a given URL. Later, set up a database where you can write queries

Finally, put your source file in this repo as backend/week1/server.py

Bonus Task

Add the following features to your URL shortner:

• Count the number of times each shortened URL has been visited
• Find number of unique visitors for each click
• Try creating a PATCH endpoint to update the destination for a link. How can you ensure that only the user who created that shortlink is able to edit it?