BookShare

Inspiration

In the age of ebooks and online readings, books end up taking a back-seat in people's lives. The social touch of people reading books and discussing them together is now lost in this world of Kindles and E-Readers. Also, the cost of physical books has deterred several book lovers from buying them. Some of these people even resort to piracy. What our inspiration behind BookShare is - To get people together, to connect people who share similar interests in books. As we see it - Books can be a person's best friends, and they can help us find other friends.

How it works

BookShare will allow each user to create their own profile, where they can add and delete books to lend out to other users. Users can then check within a 5 mile radius of their location, for people who are ready to share the book. These people will specify a period of days for which they are comfortable sharing their book. The user can determine which user they are most comfortable borrowing from, and then contact details of that user will be given. Within this limited period of time, we were able to implement the functionalities of adding books, deleting books, and browsing through users within a 5 mile radius. We also wish to add other functionalities like reviews of books posted by the different users, recommending books that were liked by other similar users, and basically expand on this idea to create a social connected network of book lovers. But one important thing that we would like to stress on is keeping the entire service free, since our motivation is getting people connected, and not profiting from this.

Challenges I ran into

There were several challenges that we ran into, which began when we decided to use IBM's BlueMix API to develop our web application. We started off using JSP, but due to some issue we could not make use of the provided Geocoding Service, and unfortunately even the experts from IBM could not help us out. Hence with around 20 hours to go, we had to prepare ourselves to implement the entire web application from scratch, using the Foundation framework for Front End, and PHP for Back End. We also experienced some difficulty while using the Google Maps API, since combining that with Foundations framework was giving us some technical difficulty.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The most important accomplishment that the three of us thing have established, is the idea itself. As several of the speakers spoke about, in the opening ceremony, in today's world where we spend more time on our phones than with our loved ones, getting people connected is the most important challenge. This becomes slightly more difficult with introverts, which is generally the case with people who read and love books. Hence we focused on that particular domain of people. We took quite some time brainstorming on the idea, checking on if the idea could lead to rights management issues, thinking of what the ideal application would be like, and finally setting a fixed set of goals for the duration of LA Hacks. So, the accomplishment we feel most proud of, is coming up with the idea, and implementing a primitive form of it within a span of 36 hours. Apart from that, we believe that at the end of the Hackathon, we feel extremely proud of the fact that all three of us were over here, at Pauley Pavilion, for the entire event, and that we managed to develop something meaningful.

What I learned

We learned a number of things over the duration of the event. First, all three of us are Back End developers, and none of us were generally comfortable with Front End Development. But over the entire development cycle, at some or the other point of time, each one of us had to work with Front End, and we can proudly say that we gave it our best. We faced the challenge of doing something we were not generally comfortable with, and we are happy with the end result. We also learned how different kinds of APIs could be used. Though we could not use multiple APIs, we did check quite a few of them, from Mashape and other websites, but could not find the right fit for our requirements.