In the age of information explosion, how do you avoid constant information overload and become focused instead of overwhelmed with information? Every day I see a variety of news, all kinds of new technology emerge in an endless stream, how to screen out what I care about?

You will think, we are to see open source software, you give me what information why, don’t worry, listen to me slowly.

The background,

Browser favorites should be our first tool in the collection of articles, websites, usually encounter favorite websites or articles is very convenient to collect to favorites; Soon our favorites were full, so we created folders to group two and three layers as I did:

Some will also use baidu home navigation such some functions to sort out their own collection of websites, I remember QQ before there is a product called network favorites, used for a period of time, then QQ also put this product to the elimination; I also tried to use evernote and Youdao Note products, which tend to collect some specific articles or log information sorted by myself.

Bookmarking and finding is not particularly problematic when the browser bookmarks sites or articles within a hundred copies. When the collection is more than 1000 copies, it is definitely a manual job to find the contents of my collection. In addition, I only save some articles temporarily and prepare to look at them later. It is also very troublesome when I need to collect, sort out and delete them.

Ii. Product introduction

Therefore, under such a background, I think I need to make such a product, which can easily collect my favorite articles or websites anytime and anywhere, so that I can easily retrieve them when I need them in the future. In addition, if possible, can I share my own articles or websites? At the same time, I can also see what articles are collected by masters or peers, so I developed such a product: Cloud collection

Core Functions:

  • Collect, classify, and retrieve articles

  • Export, export (package live from browser)

  • You can like, share, discuss

  • Registration, login, personal account

  • Temporary collection, check other people’s collection

  • The other…

Put some screenshots of the product:

The home page

registered

Home page

collection

Third, technical points

During this period, our team mainly studied Spring Boot, and this open source project became a very good product for us to practice new technologies. The main technologies are related to Spring Boot. You can refer to my previous articles Spring Boot series

Web side

Webpage side favorites home page

Favorites shortcut icon

This is the most critical step of the collection, a section of JS code, drag into the browser favorites, each click favorites is responsible for reading the site’s title, description, URL and other information, and submit to the collection page.

The front end

The front page is adapted from the angle-bootstrap Admin theme. The template engine uses Thymeleaf, see this article: SpringBoot (4) : Thymeleaf use details.

The persistence layer

The database mainly uses the Spring Data JPA template to achieve, you can refer to this article: SpringBoot (5) : Spring Data JPA use.

session

Session uses the persistence technology to save the login status, which requires a session for 30 days. It mainly relies on Redis to achieve this. See springBoot (3) : Redis is used in Spring Boot.

other

Use Grade as a build tool for the project, using a little WebJars, Vuejs, Jsoup, Scheduled…

The client

The React Native client technology will be used to develop android and IOS apps. It is currently under development and will be open source when completed.

Iv. Contents of future plans

This open source product is only open source for our Web products for the time being, and the development of android and IOS content is still in progress.

In the future, we will continue to improve these products and make some interesting small functions. The following may be what we plan to do in the near future

  • You can customize your personal favorites page

  • None Login Allows you to view popular favorites

  • Home page displays popular collectors

  • A small piece of paper

  • Intelligent recommendation

  • The other…

Do you have any more interesting ideas, you can also suggest to us

The product page

Product address: http://favorites.ren

Source address: https://github.com/cloudfavorites

Five, the afterword.

This open source project was developed by us in order to learn Spirng Boot at the beginning of 2016. At that time, we thought it would be better to build a website for use if we wanted to learn Spring Boot anyway, so we made some modifications and developed it by referring to a product on the Internet. Due to work reasons, there were many unfinished contents in the second phase of planning. You can go ahead and finish it if you’re interested.

Later, this project was put on the Internet, and I found that many people still prefer to use it, which really solved some problems of online collection. Now I search “cloud collection” on Baidu, and the first one is this product we developed. By chance, I went to see thousands of registered users and hundreds of thousands of collected articles. However, cloud collection is running on the server with the lowest matching of Ali Cloud. The access is a little slow.

As an open source project, we didn’t have to think too much about anything else, so we used a lot of techniques that we didn’t use in other projects, such as Webjars, Vue, etc. Although it has been a year, many of the techniques are still very useful for beginners to learn and practice.

If you want to learn Spring Boot systematically and don’t want to waste time looking for unreliable information on the Internet, you can also try my Talent course on Gitchat.