johnmunsch/netcomix-v1

An online CBZ format comics reader

Introduction

This is a project for testing out ideas for a CBZ comics reader that would have a nice UI written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with a healthy dose of jQuery) and a very simple server API.

Here's what it can do today (and it's not much). You can build it with Apache Ant (I used 1.8.2) and Java 6 (I used 1.6.0_26), then you can deploy the resulting WAR file (dist/netcomix.war) to a Java EE server (I used Tomcat 7.0.16), and you can visit the web app in your browser and you'll see some thumbnail images of comic covers.

Click one to start reading a comic (there are only two from which to chose :). You can use the left and right arrows on the keyboard to move forward and backward through the pages or click on the left third or right third of a page to page through with the mouse.

Notice that despite it being a so-called "one page app" all of the browser history buttons work perfectly well to move backwards and forwards through the pages you've visited. You can also bookmark pages and send a link to someone else to have them jump directly to a specific page within a comic.

That's it.

However, I did get to try out a lot of JavaScript/jQuery stuff I had not tried out before and I've got my first DWR code in there to let me communicate some info from the server to the client UI.

Be sure to check the wiki to see info about where I'm hoping to take this as I continue to revise and improve it: https://github.com/JohnMunsch/netcomix/wiki

License

Copyright (c) 2011, John Munsch
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Tech Overview

Client Side: HTML, CSS, JavaScript with jQuery, and jQuery BBQ. That's it for the moment and I got the best parts of it from the HTML 5 Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com/). You can see most of my contribution thus far in the war/index.html and war/js/script.js files.

Server Side: Java, DWR, Hibernate, HyperSQL. That's it for the moment although clearly the server side has a lot of complexity that will have to be added including things like search (probably Solr), possibly dependency injection (Spring), and actually pulling apart a CBZ file into its constituent parts in order to serve up individual page images to the client.

I have to say that I've been really pleased with building this out the way I've done it so far. Step one was a client based sample that had all of its data canned on the client side (but access to the data was encapsulated so it would be easy to swap out later). Step two inserted DWR so it was still getting canned data but now it was getting it from the server like it would do in the final system. And step three will be the server still getting canned data but it will pull it from the database so that portion too will be like in the final system. Step four will be the population of the database with real data rather than canned data and a rudimentary but functional version of the app will be available. I'm inclined to say that most any one page app could be built in this same fashion and I hope to put that to the test in later projects.

Notes

Note: There are a couple of comics in the war/comics directory that I'm using for testing. Both are out of copyright, see Digital Comic Museum (http://digitalcomicmuseum.com/) for more information and other golden age comics that never had their copyrights renewed. Another similar site is Golden Age Comics (http://goldenagecomics.co.uk/) though I haven't spent much time there yet.