Books Top 10 Widget

Aha, yet another widget. The Books Top 10 Widget shows the books that were selling best in the Belgian bookshops during the previous week (click the info button to know the week these figures are about). For this widget, we kept things really simple, we did not work with the Spring framework nor the Spring MVC framework anymore. At first, a Java process that uses the Quartz open source job scheduling system regulary spiders the boek.be website to check the availability of a new Excell file that contains the latest book selling data. If there is one, another Java class reads, parses and interprets this .xls file using the Apache POI libs. The result of this process is a set of xml files that contain a more structured view on this book selling data. The display of the Top 10 data is created by web-application that uses the new 'Play' framework that generates the widget's main page as well as the REST data service for every category of books (fiction, non-fiction, kids, ...). Play really is the discovery of the year as it bundles all advantages of Rails and Java together in what they call an easier way to build Web applications with Java. It’s a clean alternative to bloated Enterprise Java stacks. Check it out!