TextRealm

TextRealm is an application that I had developed along with three other peers for our final project for our software engineering class. The purpose of the site is to allow UH students to easily buy and sell their textbooks to other UH students to cut down the cost and stress of buying textbooks. UH students can create an account and view books being sold by other UH students, and can also sell textbooks that they own by uploading an entry to the site. Our site allows users to search for books based on the book’s ISBN-10, the title of the book, or the author of the book. Users are also able to review their buying experience with another user by rating and commenting on their experience, in which their response is displayed on the site for other users to see. Administrators of the site have the power to view all of the textbooks in the database and can delete an entry if it contains inappropriate content. I had done the add/edit portions of the project, as well as created the ratings system, the search portion, and the book and user profile pages in IntelliJ IDEA. Alongside implementing those pages, I had also designed and created our logo in GIMP.

This project had presented many challenges as we progressed, such as some team members being unable to fulfill the tasks that they were given, and that the circumstances did not allow for us to meet up as frequently as I would have liked. However, we had been able to finish the project as we managed to work out our issues and aid each other whenever we needed it. While it was stressful at times, I feel like I’ve gained a lot from this project experience, from checking up on my teammates and communicating as effectively as possible with them given the circumstances with COVID-19, to recognizing each team member’s strengths and weaknesses that they brought to the table, and utilizing those strengths to produce a quality application. This project management experience helped me to leave my comfort zone and exercise my leadership skills while allowing me to display the knowledge that I had collected throughout this software engineering class. Moving forward, I hope to improve and eventually master these skills and habits as my college career progresses.

You can find our project’s home page here and our GitHub organization with our source code here.