Conspire Challenge

Thanks for your interest in Conspire and for offering to complete our coding exercise. Our goal is to get to know you, your code and your problem-solving skills while being respectful of your time.

For this exercise, you'll build a REST API endpoint that reads from flat files stored on Amazon S3 and provides structured data to the client.

##Requirements

###Endpoint

Your task is to implement a RESTful /query HTTP GET endpoint in the Web framework of your choice. If you're familiar with them, Ruby on Rails and Play Framework are both part of the Conspire stack, but you're free to use whatever framework you prefer.

###Authenticated S3 reads

When a client accesses the /query endpoint, it should read in all of the files in the Amazon S3 bucket conspire-challenge and return their contents as a JSON blob as specified below.

For reference, the contents of one of the files, opposites.txt, is as follows (where \t denotes the tab character):

Led Zeppelin\tlameness
platypuses\tlikely things
Led Zeppelin\tMaroon 5
Boulder, CO\tHouston

An AWS access key id and secret with access to conspire-challenge will be provided to you over email.

###Output

The /query endpoint should return a JSON blob consisting of a single, one-dimensional array of "line" objects, each representing one nonempty line of text from the files, with the following properties, all strings:

• filename: The name of the S3 object (i.e. file) from which the line came
• key: The part of the line preceding the first tab character, without leading or trailing whitespace
• value: The remainder of the line, without leading or trailing whitespace

###Sorting

The /query endpoint should accept a single URL parameter, sort, which is a string of length zero or greater consisting of only the characters f, k and v, in any order and each occurring any number of times, that will determine the sort order of the returned line objects.

The line objects returned by the /query endpoint should be sorted according to the following rules:

1. If the sort argument is not provided or is empty, the line objects should be sorted as though a value of fkv had been provided.
2. If the argument is of length 1 or greater, the line objects should be sorted as follows:
3. If the first character of sort is f, in alphabetical order of filename
4. If the first character of sort is k, in alphabetical order of key
5. If the first character of sort is v, in alphabetical order of value
6. Line objects with identical values for the property indicated by the first character of sort should be sorted as though a sort value had been provided equal to sort[1..-1] (the part of sort following the first character).

So, for example, a call to /query?sort=kv should return a JSON array of objects sorted by key, then value, then filename, in descending order of precedence. Note the inclusion of filename as a sort parameter under rules 1 and 3 above.

Guidelines

In addition to the Web framework you choose, you can and should use any open-source libraries applicable to the task.

Feel free to search the web, read online documentation, etc. the way you would if this were a real project.

Please don't hesitate to ask us any questions you might have about the requirements, technical issues, or anything else. One intent of this exercise is to get a feel for what it would be like to work on a project together, so don't be afraid to speak up at any time.

Submission

You should push your code to a new GitHub respository. Send us an email when you're done and we'll pull it down, verify the output and take a close look at your code.

Thanks for giving us this chance to get to know you and your code!