Redesign to work with other user-agents

[oliwer]

Hi,

After talking with @genio we thought it would be great if WWW::Shorten (and its plugins in particular) could become the universal way to shorten URLs in perl, which means it should work with any user-agent and both in blocking and non-blocking mode. That would be smarter than writing a shortener for each web framework out there.

So today I wrote a prototype : https://github.com/oliwer/www-shorten/tree/redesign

The most interesting change is the rewrite of the TinyURL plugin :

• it does not depend on WWW::Shorten anymore
• all the code depending on the user-agent has been removed
• it is a lot shorter and simpler than the original
• it can be used with non-blocking frameworks like Mojo or AnyEvent

All the WWW::Shorten code has been moved to the main package. The 'generic' and 'UserAgent' packages have been removed.

Anyway, tell me what you think.

[oliwer]

Just look at how simple things can be! https://gist.github.com/oliwer/d1216099b998cff5c228

[oliwer]

I have restored the generic and UserAgent package so that we are still compatible with the old API.

[genio]

It looks good to me so far! I'm testing and trying to plan out a schedule to publish

[oliwer]

Great! I will focus on tests and documentation then. A few questions though:

• which function name do you prefer between shorterlink_start and shorterlink_request ?
• do you plan to replace LWP by HTTP::Tiny one day?
• do you know a way to get the email address of all WWW::Shorten plugin authors?

[genio]

I'm in favor of brevity when naming functions shorter_start short_start etc. I'm flexible

It's absolutely in my list to change from LWP to HTTP::Tiny. I was hoping to get all ::Shorten service authors on board with this first.

As for their email addresses, what I've been doing thus far is to lookup all Shorten services on metacpan.org, find the author, and email them (there are less than 50 so it's not too terrible). I haven't had too great of a success rate on these. ::Bitly and ::Yourls are problematic as the author doesn't seem to have a valid email address anywhere. But, that's what the toolchain gang can help with once an appropriate amount of time has passed and proof of effort has been displayed.

If you're up for it, please feel free to contact Shorten service authors and see if they can pass off privileges. If we can get them all updated (and we don't break the current usage API) then I think we're ok.

Also, WWW::Shorten::Simple does nicen up the interface already. Maybe we can capitalize on that work some.