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To enable users to look at list of stories a particular has user worked on, we created a user page that is reachable by clicking on usernames. Since user pages are fairly normal, and in a writing community, users are likely to want to read work by authors they like, we felt that this page, though simple in design, would be important, and even expected by our target user population.

Implementation

We built the website using Apache Tomcat and MySQL on a Linux machine.  We found JSP's and Servlets extremely easy to create and use, which made development go pretty quickly.  We used JSP's for serving out the pages with lots of HTML and only used Servlets for handling asynchronous requests.  We also used some classes as Beans to abstract away the database queries.  Interface behavior was done with a lot of CSS and Javascript, relying heavily on AJAX to avoid frequent page refreshes.  Most of the Javascript was home-brew, but we did use JQuery-ui for its autocomplete functionality.  The only problem with the implementation was that we could never get Database Connection Pooling working properly with Servlets, which caused the website to occasionally (once a day or so) lose the ability to query the database until restarted.  Obviously, this is a huge issue from a website usability standpoint, but since it didn't directly impact the interface (and since this is a user interface class), we decided not to pursue a bug fix.  For the most part, we had no problems with the systems used in our implementation; the only issue was that we were building everything ourselves (Java backend, CSS, Javascript, etc), which took a lot of time.

Evaluation

Background

We aim to construct an online interface for authors to easily collaborate on and share original and fan fiction. The target users are amateur writers who want to work together, mostly for fun, but sometimes also to improve their writing. Collaboration is a major component of the site, with various authors having the ability to append sections to a single story. Each story has one or more administrators, who are responsible for adding and removing authors, and deleting any abusive comments. Depending on the style of stories the administrators want to write, authors can either have permission to 'write,' meaning add sections to the end of the story, or 'edit,' meaning alter the current text of the story.

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