KOMODO Books exercise app

Demo

A live demo is available at http://komodo.arclight.industries/

Rationale

The goal was to use the technologies KOMODO is using, where that was known and practical. To that extent, the exercise uses:

• Node.js
• TypeScript
• Prisma
• Express
• Jest
• Vue3 with Vue Router and the Pinia data store
• Vuetify component library
• pnpm package manager
• Postgres
• Docker and docker compose

In some cases choices were made based on familiarity, and in others novelty. I wanted to learn Prisma, see how pnpm handled a monorepo, and try the Vue3 composition API. In some cases these caused hiccups in development, but what I learned was well worth the effort.

The project is divided into four containers - frontend, backend, database, and "models". The first three don't need explanation or justification. With models, I wanted to share type definitions across the front and back ends using a single schema definition. The way Prisma works out of the box coupled with how pnpm manages monorepo packages makes for something fun to talk about in the post-mortem. The models container is in charge of setting up the db structure and seeding the data.

Everything is running in dev mode, not as a production-ready service. Local files are mounted into the running containers and hot reloading is enabled for exploration.

Assumptions

• A single user - no sessions, login, etc.
• books.json is the full list of the user's books, not the system catalog, of which the user's library is a subset.
• The same book can be in multiple lists

Setup

Assuming you have git, docker, and docker compose installed:

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/arcli/komodo-books.git

Set up the .env file

cp .env{.sample,}

Start the containers

docker compose up

Play

Browse http://localhost:3000

Out of scope

Concerns intentionally left out, generally to simplify.

• Sessions
• GraphQL
• Production build
• Deployment
• CI/CD
• Internationalization

Known issues

Dockerization of the multiple projects within the repo has been problematic and fragile. Some time would be well spent cleaning this up, possibly with a different approach than the layer-sharing one currently used.

Initial rendering speed of the My Books page isn't good. There's a couple things we could do to improve and/or mask that.

The codebase is not particularly well typed. We could do a lot more with type safety across the board.

Tests are minimal.