Anagram Service

Example Rails 5.2 web app producing anagrams for one or more words supplied as part of the url. Only real words are processed/returned, real being defined in terms of a wordlist including terms.

Specification

The application receives HTTP GET requests with the requested word as the path. It returns the results as JSON.

Example 1

GET /crepitus

    {"crepitus":["cuprites","pictures","piecrust"]}

GET /crepitus,paste,kinship,enlist,boaster,fresher,sinks,knits,sort

    {"crepitus":["cuprites","pictures","piecrust"],"paste":["pates","peats","septa","spate","tapes","tepas"],"kinship":["pinkish"],"enlist":["elints","inlets","listen","silent","tinsel"],"boaster":["boaters","borates","rebatos","sorbate"],"fresher":["refresh"],"sinks":["skins"],"knits":["skint","stink","tinks"],"sort":["orts","rots","stor","tors"]}

GET /sdfwehrtgegfg

    {"sdfwehrtgegfg":[]}

Requirements

Ruby 2.5.5
Rails 5.2.3
Sqlite3 (dev/test) or Postgresql (production)

Configuration

No configuration is required for this service, as it has no external dependencies.

Database initialisation

A suitable production wordlist for this service has been included with the source code (db/wordlist.txt). It can be loaded into the current database with this command:

bundle exec rake import:wordlist

Test suite

The test suite can be run with rake:

bundle exec rake test

In addition, performance and scalability of this service may be assessed by running:

bundle exec rake test:performance

This proves that the performance on anagram searches does not degrade with database size.

Deployment instructions

The easiest way to deploy this somewhere is clicking on this button:

Note: the wordlist contains more records than the Heroku free database tier can handle. You'll need to provision a Hobby Basic Postgresql add-on.

You'll then need to populate the database. On Heroku, you can do:

heroku run --app=name-of-your-app bundle exec rake import:wordlist

The latest master of this repo may (or may not :-) be running already here: https://anagram-service.herokuapp.com/paste

Known issues

Importing the production wordlist into the database takes a long time. The import process could be improved using system and/or database tools or parallelisation.

mnacos/anagram-service