Tag: mvc

Facebook App: ReadingList – share your books

Gain wisdom of the world. As the famous Jim Rohn stated ~ “All Leaders Are Readers”. If you are a book worm and also on Facebook then you should grab this free awesome Facebook Application I developed called ReadingList.

What is ReadingList?

ReadingList allows you to share the books you are reading or have read with your friends on Facebook. It also acts as your online library to store the list of your books. Simple, easy to use and it works! What better way to inspire your Facebook friends then by sharing the great books in your books library. Be a leader and start inspiring your friends on Facebook today and make a difference in their life.

Give ReadingList a try. Visit this URL:
http://apps.facebook.com/readinglist/

ReadingList in detail

The product is simple. Both from ease of use to functionality.

Fig 1 screen shot below illustrates how your Facebook Wall will look when you add / update a book in the ReadingList application. Now your friends can see the cool book you are reading along with whether you recommend it and your personal comments about this book – cool hey!

Fig1. Your book activity gets posted to your Facebook wall to inspire your friends

Fig 2 screen shot below is of the main page where you search for a book you are reading or have read. The search mechanism automatically looks up Amazon books repository and presents the findings in a horizontally scrollable pane. When you locate the book you want to add click “Select book” button beneath the book image.

Fig2. Find a book and share it with your Facebook friends

Fig 3 screen shot below is of the community page where you can see what your friends and other users of ReadingList application are reading. This is a great page to learn about other new cool and exciting books.

Fig3. See what the ReadingList community is reading

Give ReadingList a try. Visit this URL:
http://apps.facebook.com/readinglist/

Under the hood – for the tech savvy

Here’s a breakdown of the technology behind this Facebook Application ReadingList:

  • ReadingList was built on a LAMP stack – Linux (CentOS 5.5), Apache, MySQL 5 and PHP 5.2.
  • ReadingList runs through a powerful open source PHP web application Framework with a small footprint called CodeIgniter 1.7. (update: as of Feb 8, 2010 it is now upgraded to the better & faster 2.0)
  • On the front-end, latest version of jQuery is used to achieve UI behaviors.
  • The Software Architecture behind ReadingList is MVC (Model–View–Controller) with Active record pattern.
  • ReadingList also uses OAuth with Facebook Graph API and Amazon Web Services API.
  • Future performance (and fun) enhancements on the cards are Memcache, Apache Cassandra (NoSQL) and Facebook’s HipHop.

Toby Beresford did an informative presentation in London on CodeIgniter as a great framework for rapid application development. See it on Slideshare here.

If you have any ideas how I can further enhance this application especially around the product side please let me know in the “Discussions” area here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=102322113161984 or drop a comment below.

Cheers,
~ Ernest

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