joops75 / booktrader

An app that facilitates the borrowing and lending of books between users.

booktrader

An app that facilitates the borrowing and lending of books between users.

This app is built upon the code at https://scotch.io/tutorials/easy-node-authentication-setup-and-local.

The home address presents the user with a login/signup page. These processes are validated using passport.js with the passport-local package to provide the user with local login functionality. The user must submit their current location which is used in the 'Search books' function, and their contact email which is shown privately between borrowers/lenders as a means of contact to manage their transactions. Passwords are hashed/validated by bcrypt-nodejs and stored in a mongodb database along with the users' other data. Any errors in the authentication process result in a message being displayed via connect-flash.

When logged in, a user may change any of their details apart from their username. Via 'My books', they may add books they have available and are willing to loan by entering their isbns. This function uses the Open Library Books API, which is detailed at https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books. The added books are appended to the user's information in the database. If another user has requested any of these books, their details (including email) will be shown along with an option to accept or deny the request. If a book request is accepted, the user's email is made visible to the requester, along with an option to cancel the loan. Any book not on loan and without any current requests may be deleted.

Books from others in a specific location can be found via 'Search books', which queries the database with the search terms provided in the search bar and displays the matching results. Here a user may request a book they would like to borrow, which then can be reviewed via 'My Requests/Borrowings'. Any pending requests may be cancelled here.

The 'My books', 'Search books' and 'My Requests/Borrowings' pages are displayed by passing the users' information gained from the database via passport to an ejs template, which are rendered using a single file of embedded react.js code. Ideally this should be modularised with the use of a build tool such as webpack.

The CSS files were created by first writing SASS code, and then compiling it with the globally installed node-sass package via the command 'npm run sass'.

In development mode, files are served via the '/src' directory which features a 'books.ejs' file that runs an in-browser babel transformer to compile jsx and es6 code. A production build is made by running 'npm run compile', which uses the babel-compile package and stores files in '/compiled'. The in-browser babel transformer cdn can then be removed from '/compiled/views/books.ejs and the body's script tag type changed from 'text/babel' to 'text/javascript'. The compiled files can then be served by running 'node compiled/server.js'.

Technologies used in this project:

• node
• express
• html
• sass
• jquery
• bootstrap
• ejs
• mongodb
• mongoose
• react
• passport

Addtional packages of note:

• passport-local
• bcrypt-nodejs
• connect-flash
• babel-compile