I’ve just launched thriftebook - a tiny ebook deal aggregator that can make the task of not spending money on ebooks… well.. harder. The whole app is written in Gaelyk - a groovy-based web framework that makes writing Google App Engine apps a complete snack. The site is basically a clone of the excellent Ruby techbooksdotd but with a few essential enhancements that I was craving.
For one, you can now subscribe to a single RSS feed to get all the deals directly into your aggregator (neither of Manning or Apress provide feeds right now), or start following @thriftebook to get it straight into your twitter feed. The Website also shows how long the deal has been active, so you can get a feel for when it’s likely to expire. It’s been a fun little journey, greatly sped up by Rob’s excellent Regexp work for each of the publishers documented here. I wrote the majority of the app in a single day last Tuesday, and then patched in a few extra features as I thought of them. So the Gaelyk learning curve is pretty low.
In about 400 LOC, built with the excellent Gaelyk maven plugin, I’ve managed to incorporate:
So how has my first major Gaelyk development experience been? Pretty great once I got underway. It felt a lot like hacking on a php app: really quick to get going, but I’m not sure I could scale it out to an app of any size (I know you can write tidy php apps that maintain like a dream, I’m just saying that I never had the discipline for that). The Gaelyk samples encourage you to following a MVC approach, and but it doesn’t presently provide any direct unit testing support, so the temptation to just “hack something up” is pretty strong, meaning I’d probably switch to a Grails app if I was going to write something any bigger than a few actions. (shameless plug: If you’re looking for a fun Grails book, go check mine out).
I have to say that the docs were absolutely first rate, and the maven plugin made local and remote deployment super simple (mvn gae:run and mvn gae:deploy). If you’re keen to have a look at the source, it’s all on BitBucket for your cloning pleasure. You don’t need anything installed locally except Maven. Fire off a “mvn gae:run” and it’ll pull down the internet for you.
Try not to buy too many ebooks… At about $10 a go, my current library greatly exceeds my reading pace, but it’s so hard to turn down a good bargain…