Anagram search application

Overview

The anagram application POC (ProveOfConcept) is able to provide anagrams for a given English language word given a corpus of English language words.

The application is based on connextion wrapper over Flask framework. Persistent SQLite wrapped with SQLAlchemy is used for storage which should be enough for the POC scope. Date model is based on anagram map: letters in each word are counted and their count is noted in a letter 'map' (see swagger_server/services/models.py).

Full disclosure: The initial application boilerplate was generated in Swagger-frist manner. Swagger definitions were created in swagger.io SAAS and auto-generated boilerplat e was exported (hence the name swagger_server of the server root folder). This was to experiment with Swagger-definition-first toolings out there. This turned out to be not a very productive choice, however. Generated server boilerplate was trimmed, mangled, and augmented. The original boilerplate can bee found under /homework_task/boilerplate_generation/python-flask-server-generated.zip. Detailed list of changes to the boilerplate presented in this commit. In the end, the connextion wrapper was used only for input/output validation based on definitions in swagger/swagger.yaml and for the Swagger UI that comes for free.

Requirements

Make, virtualenv, python3 (tested on v 3.10).

Usage

To run the server, please execute the following from the root directory:

cd swagger_server && make run

Command line

Adding words to the corpus

$ curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{ "words": ["read", "dear", "dare"] }' http://localhost:8080/api/v1/words
HTTP/1.1 201 Created
...

Fetching anagrams

$ curl -i http://localhost:8080/api/v1/anagrams/read
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...
{
  anagrams: [
    "dear",
    "dare"
  ]
}

Delete single word

$ curl -i -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/v1/words/read
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
...

Delete all words

$ curl -i -X DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/v1/words
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content

UI

You can open your browser to here to review Swagger and execute sample calls:

http://localhost:8080/api/v1/ui/

Running with Docker

To run the server on a Docker container, please execute the following from the root directory:

# building the image
docker build -t swagger_server .

# starting up a container
docker run -p 8080:8080 swagger_server

Testing

To launch unit and integration tests, please execute the following from the root directory:

cd swagger_server && make test

Performance

Ingesting ~235k English words from homework_task/dictionary.txt takes ~25 minutes.

Finding anagrams for word in ~235k corpus takes <100ms.

TODOs:

Known bugs

• Add flake8 Make target and clean up PEP-8.
• Review configs: Use dev/testing/production config appropriatly.

Immediate TODOs:

• Add column corpus.word.is_proper_nount for proper nount statistics endpoint.

Nice to haves:

• Switch from python's builtin web server to UWSGI (part of configuration?).
• Start using requirements.in and requirements-dev.in.
• Review errors - maybe not rely on connextion validation? CI/CD.
• Add Alembic DB schema migration.