Requirements

Let's imagine we're building the core of a system inspired by Product Hunt. This system allows users to discover, share, and upvote new products. The core challenge lies in designing a robust and extensible system that manages products, users, categories, votes, and comments in an efficient and thread-safe manner. The system should allow for various sorting strategies (e.g., by popularity, recent submissions) and handle concurrent access without data corruption. Moreover, it should be easily extensible to support new product attributes, ranking algorithms, and features like user-specific recommendations. The essence is creating a well-structured object-oriented design. # Requirements ## Functional Requirements 1. **Product Submission:** * Users should be able to submit new products, including a name, description, URL, and a list of categories. * The system should validate the product information (e.g., URL format, name length). * Each product submission should automatically associate the submitting user as the product creator. 2. **Product Display:** * The system should display products with their name, description, URL, creator, categories, number of upvotes, and comments. * Products should be paginated. 3. **Product Categorization:** * Products should be organized into multiple categories (e.g., "AI", "Mobile Apps", "Web Development"). * Users should be able to browse products by category. 4. **Upvoting:** * Users should be able to upvote products. * Each user can only upvote a product once. * The system must prevent duplicate upvotes from the same user for the same product. This requires careful consideration of thread safety. * The total number of upvotes for each product should be accurately maintained. 5. **Commenting:** * Users should be able to add comments to products. * Comments should include the commenter, timestamp, and comment text. * Comments should be displayed in chronological order (or optionally sorted by upvotes, though that's a stretch goal). 6. **Sorting and Filtering:** * Products should be sortable by: * Most upvotes (Popularity). * Newest submissions (Date). * Products should be filterable by category. 7. **User Authentication (Simplified):** * Assume a simplified user model where each user has a unique ID and a name. The authentication itself is out of scope, but the user context is essential. 8. **Search:** * Users should be able to search for products by name or description. The search should be case-insensitive. ## Non-Functional Requirements 1. **Thread Safety:** The upvoting mechanism and any shared data structures (e.g., product lists, vote counts) *must* be thread-safe to prevent race conditions and data corruption. Use appropriate synchronization mechanisms. 2. **Extensibility:** The system should be easily extensible to support: * New product attributes (e.g., pricing, license type). * New sorting algorithms (e.g., trending score based on upvotes and time). * Different storage mechanisms (e.g., in-memory, file-based, database). Consider using interfaces and abstract classes to achieve this. * Advanced features like user-specific recommendations. 3. **Modularity:** The system should be modular, with clear separation of concerns between different components (e.g., product management, user management, voting). 4. **Testability:** The code should be designed to be easily testable. This includes using dependency injection and avoiding tight coupling between classes. 5. **Maintainability:** The code should be well-documented and easy to understand, following SOLID principles. 6. **Performance:** The system should be performant enough to handle a reasonable number of users and products. Focus on algorithmic efficiency (e.g., using appropriate data structures for searching and sorting). Avoid premature optimization, but be mindful of potential bottlenecks. 7. **Scalability:** While not focusing on distributed systems, the design should avoid single points of contention that would prevent scaling up the in-memory data structures. ## Core Entities 1. **Product:** Represents a product with attributes like name, description, URL, creator, categories, upvotes, and comments. 2. **User:** Represents a user with a unique ID and name. 3. **Category:** Represents a category to which products can belong. 4. **Vote:** Represents an upvote from a user for a product. 5. **Comment:** Represents a comment made by a user on a product. 6. **ProductService:** An interface/class responsible for managing products (adding, retrieving, sorting, filtering). This is a key abstraction point. 7. **VoteService:** An interface/class responsible for managing votes (adding, counting). Handles thread safety for upvotes. 8. **CategoryService:** An interface/class responsible for managing categories. 9. **SearchService:** An interface/class responsible for searching products.

Design System Simiar to the Product-hunt (share and discover new products)

Requirements

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