A simple application to search for ebooks from free sources: currently Project Gutenberg and HathiTrust.
This application requires Ruby & the bundler gem. To start working with the app:
bundle installbundle exec rake db:createbundle exec rake db:migrateirb -r ./config/environmentand (inside irb)HathiParser.new.load(eventually this work will be moved to the seeds file)
This application will need a number of different parts to get going:
- A Canonical Book object with the appropriate data for the application: including dependent classes such as Subjects, Creators, etc.
- Service objects for each ebook source that know how to translate raw data into a Canonical Book: i) These service objects should check for existing books in the database before creating a new book. ii) If no book exists, these objects should create a new book and add the source information. iii) If a book already exists, these objects should add themselves as a source (if they are not already added as a source).
- A database to hold Canonical Book objects & dependent classes and search against them: This should include indexing along common search areas, such as subjects, authors/creators, titles, etc.
- A background job for each ebook source (likely not possible in this short release): This background job would run once a day to update against existing sources, adding new books and/or sources as they become available.
- A totally swanky view to display each awesome book: Completely untouched in this version, but a way to search is important to a search app, of course. I've also started setting up PgSearch to allow easy searching against the database.