Google Shortening URLs

As another quick follow on note from the below, one of the features that was built in to the application was the ability to share your resume or particular achievements with your friends on Twitter. To do this, I obviously wanted to share a link back to the URL of the resume, so to maximise the potential additional text I investigated URL shortening.

Their is a bit.ly API that uses OAuth, but for what I wanted to do, I decided that was overkill, as I didn't necessarily need to associate the shortened URLs to a users bit.ly account, all I really cared about was getting a shortened URL.

Fortunately, Google came to the rescue with their goo.gl URL shortening service that also exposes a public API without need for authentication.

So I simply wrote a service class that utilised the Spring RestTemplate class to shorten URLs:

@Service("urlShortenService")
public class UrlShortenService {

       private RestTemplate restTemplate;

       public UrlShortenService() {
              restTemplate = new RestTemplate(ClientHttpRequestFactorySelector.getRequestFactory());
              List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> messageConverters = new ArrayList<HttpMessageConverter<?>>();
              messageConverters.add(new StringHttpMessageConverter());
              messageConverters.add(new MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter());
              restTemplate.setMessageConverters(messageConverters);
       }
	   
       public String shortenUrl(String url) {
              Map<String, String> request = new HashMap<String, String>();
              request.put("longUrl", url);
              LinkedHashMap<String, String> shortUrl = restTemplate.postForObject("https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url", request, LinkedHashMap.class);
              return shortUrl.get("id");
       }
}

I didn't worry too much about validating that the string passed in was a URL for the time being as I always had control of that, but that should be something that would need to be considered.