Announcing hash.to

27 January 2011

Late last year I released the first version of my latest project - http://hash.to - a url shortener written in Java.

It's pretty basic in terms of the functionality on offer at the moment but I decided to release the MVP rather than wait until I'd got round to implementing the rest of the functionality.

I know there are plenty of really good URL shortener services already out there but as a developer I wanted to create my own for a few reasons.

See if it was possible to create one in Java
Learn a different Java web framework along the way
Finally get round to using UrlRewrite in a project
Buy myself a really short URL
Create some web services that other developers can use
Above all else to see if I could!

As I mentioned it's written in Java; Struts 2 is used as the web framework, Hibernate for ORM, UrlRewrite to manage the URL design, MySQL as the database behind the service all running in Apache Tomcat on a VPS from Bytemark.

I'm looking for as many people as possible to test/use the service and provide some feedback and right now you can get yourself some really short URL's!

I've also created a blog on Tumblr for the service which I'll keep up to date with any changes to the service.