Let's make an experimental Twitter clone web app by Ruby on Rails version 3.
The minimum features of Twitter clone app are below:
- A visitor can sign up and get an account to become a user
- A user can post tweets
- A visitor and a user can see another user's one single tweet or a sequence of tweets
- A visitor and a user can see public timeline
- A user can follow another user
- A user can see "timeline" of the followings' tweets
I cut the following features for ease:
- A user can see "mentions"
- A user can leave (unfollow) others
- A user can send or receive direct messages
But I also would want to add the following internal feature which the real Twitter seems to be using:
- A timeline is not created just in time, but created when a user of the participants posted a tweet
This feature reduces the load time of reading a timeline.
So what's the difference?
- It doesn't use any special software but just use Rails3
- It doesn't use a relational DB for storing tweets
- It is fast and scales (hopefully)
The Product "twi1"
I named it "twi1" without thinking anything. That's here. http://twi1.heroku.net/
Note that currently it doesn't work because heroku doesn't support writing a file. I should look for another way if I use heroku.
The below screenshots are on my local server.
The public/user timeline is stored as the below.
