As something I’m doing just because I want to and as a learning experience, I’m in the beginning stages of creating a web application where users can manage data on books: books they own, books they’ve read, and books they want to read. Assuming I stick with it, I figure I’ll post occasional articles here on the progress; hopefully providing some useful information on some of the issues I encounter as well as showing how my warped mind approaches such a task.
I started thinking about this a week or two ago, and posted a thread at KindleBoards.com to get some feedback on what sort of features people might like. I’m still in the process of deciding which suggestions to embrace and which to ignore. In the meantime I’ve started to forge ahead on the database design. I find that if I get the database structure right, then the rest falls into place much more easily — as opposed to making the database design fit my application code. My first major snag is trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that book titles are not unique (titles cannot be copyrighted). For details on that issue, I just started a thread at PHPBuilder.com, hoping some database expert will have a magical solution for me.
About the only firm decision at this point is that the app will be built upon the CodeIgniter framework, simply because I’m used to it, and it works. I’ve done some preliminary layout work for the front end, and have been making progress on using the Amazon.com Product Advertising API to (hopefully) provide a simple means for users to add books to their lists via a simple drag-and-drop of a URL from an Amazon web page. Unfortunately for us Amazon Kindle users, the Amazon database is currently not playing nice with Kindle books, so for now it’s limited to print book pages.
More to come soon, I hope….