BookLion
BookLion
Book Summaries You Can Edit
BookLion is a web-based, publicly accessible (https://booklion.com) system designed to allow the user to store the following information about a book they are reading:
- Book title, author, year, genre, and description
- Chapter summaries
- Character descriptions
- Locations
- Species
The system allows book summaries to be shared among all users of the system so that if one person enters information about a book, other users of the system can view and edit notes on all books.
The system also tracks the chapter with which each note is associated. This way, other users can limit what they see and avoid unwanted spoilers.
Technology
BookLion is written in Java utilizing GWT and SQL.
While this software runs as intended very well, it is an utter embarrassment in terms of the technology chosen for its development. It is the first web-based application I wrote from scratch by myself. Not fully understanding the landscape, wanting to avoid HTML, and falling for Google’s hype, I chose the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Also, in ignorance, I chose the Hibernate ORM. Both turned out to be extremely poor choices. Yet, the system runs fine, and I’ve learned some valuable lessons.
This system requires:
- Java 7
- GWT 2.5.1 (included)
- Tomcat 7
- Hibernate 3.6.5 (included)
As developed, the system uses the PostgreSQL database. The schema is located in
schema/booklion-schema.sql
An IntelliJ project is included with the system.
Subsequent to the development of this system, and perhaps in response to the experience, I ended up writing my own open-source, full-stack web development framework called KISS. You can check it out at https://kissweb.org or https://github.com/blakemcbride/Kiss
The home for the code is at https://github.com/blakemcbride/BookLion