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Inspiration
When buying books for school, we would often buy the books from students from previous years who took the same class. The people with the books also want to get rid of them, since they have no use for them anymore. Because of this, we wanted to develop a way to exchange books with people close to you easily. For example, you can get math textbooks and SAT books from other people who live close to you once they are done using them. We wanted to create a platform for local networks of students to more easily buy and sell books with each other, which would save resources both financially and environmentally.
What it does
This site connects users who want to buy a book to users who live near them who want to give away the same book by exchanging emails. It allows you to create a profile with books wanted and books to give away, and edit these fields as you exchange books.
How we built it
We built a Spring Boot-based web application that is powered by REST APIs backed by a MySQL database engine (which is where all our data - profile data, book list data- gets stored). The front end was written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. The map on the explore page was incorporated using the Google Maps Javascript API.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into problems in coordinating with all the team members, with a virtual environment and outside responsibilities. There were many issues in the beginning with environment setup and language compatibility. In addition, we were unfamiliar with HTML, CSS, and jQuery. The Google Maps Javascript API map also required hours of debugging. We also had school during the last day of the hackathon so we were unable to work on it then.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was the entire team’s first time participating in a hackathon, so we are very proud to have been able to create a full site, with both frontend and backend. Merging front and back end was particularly difficult, and we are proud of using teamwork and communication to succeed in that end. We utilized different platforms to achieve maximum productivity, first using Replit to prototype the front end and then integrated the backend with VSCode.
What we learned
Even though we did not know a lot of html and Jquery, or how to use databases, we learned a lot through this process. Primarily, we learned a lot about backend and how to work with databases/ the different syntaxes to use. We also learned that planning our time for a hackathon and setting up the environment ahead of time is very important.
What's next for BookXChange
There are many things we could improve on: Currently our site can be accessed through a local server; we could provide a domain name to make it more easily accessible Maps page/front end formatting and implement code for edge cases. Allow the user more freedom in finding matches by searching general genres of books, like “SAT Books”, instead of searching with ISBNs. Allow user to enter a preferred distance radius for available books instead of limiting compatibility to zip code
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