pariks/smallbackendproject

#engagementlabs Back-End Project

#engagementlabs Back-End Project

Object:

Create a PHP 5.6+ application that hourly crawls the evolution of fans of the Facebook Coca-Cola page (https://www.facebook.com/cocacola).
Answer some questions on how to make this system scale (see Deliverable section.)

Rules:

(In the text below, {fb_page_id} = "cocacola")

• The crawling robot must be executed by a cron job every hour via a command line such as (but not necessarily) :
  php index.php --uri=crawler/fans --page_id={fb_page_id}

• The API should return a JSON object via a URL such as (but not necessarily) :
  http://localhost/myframework/get/fans?page_id={fb_page_id}&format=linechart

• The API should be able to take a format parameter that change the structure of the JSON object outputed

• There will be 3 format: linechart, table, multiplepage. There's json files in this project to show the expected outputs

• Database technology, data structure and application architecture is up to you.

Deliverable:

• Fork this project

• Push to your forked repository, containing your PHP files, cron file, an export of your database

• In your repository wiki, answer the questions and put any additionnal informations

• Create a pull request to submit your project.

• Make sure your repository is publicly accessible

Question:

• Let us imagine we now have 100.000 Facebook pages to get fans count of, every 10 minutes. Please provide a quick answer to the following questions :

  • What would you change in your architecture to cope with the load ?
  • What kind of other possible problems would you think of ?
  • How would you propose to control data quality ?

• Any other comments you might find useful

Evaluation:

• We will evaluate if the requirements above work as expected

• We will evaluate the structure of the application and the logic behind the separation of concerns. For example in the eventuality of adding other crawlers such as crawling Twitter followers of a Twitter account.

• We will evaluate overall code quality and readability

• We will evaluate the answers to the question listed in the Deliverable section and other comments that you may have found useful

Cheers!