Ivan Lakhturov

Recently I've finished the website called Choose Your Textbook. This is a Scientific Literature Browser. One can browse there through the tree of science (the branches are taken from the wiki), and see the short description of those sciences. To the right there is an Amazon search box, where the name of the currently chosen branch is dynamically loaded, thus it shows the (most) relevant books at Amazon for a specific discipline.

Technically speaking, this is a mashup, but part of mashing is done offline. It's with my tools written in Scheme, and it is possible to do that dynamically, as there exist Scheme-s embedded to JS. But not for this project. The tooling converts that specific wiki-page in a chain HTML -> SXML -> (filtering) -> JSON. The latter is embedded to the website's JS. A nice tree / graph renderer called JIT is used to show the tree. JIT does animation / morphing and supports a few layouts. Seems, though, it cannot switch between them dynamically. I've stumbled at some other restrictions also, e.g. couldn't setup decent automatic node sizes.

Despite I've designed the website as an Amazon affiliate, I knew there wouldn't be much popularity. I tried to put a link to Hacker News and to Reddit, but both unsuccessful. So, there are almost no visitors at all. Nevertheless, my point was to try a few things: make my first mashup, write some tooling in Scheme, including DOM-manipulation, try out some web graph renderer, and last but not least, I wanted to skim through the tree of Science looking with one eye on existing appropriate literature list. And those goals are accomplished.

Tags: js | major | scheme | web

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