• About Groo

Groo is written in PHP 5.1 with Horde 3.1.

The code can be found in the Horde CVS: http://cvs.horde.org/incubator/groo/

You can see Groo running here: http://wanderingbooks.org

++ High-level use cases

At a minimum, Groo should allow a user to:

• catalog her books, by typing ISBNs or scanning barcodes

• invite friends who will have access to her books

• ask to borrow a book

• approve lending of a book

After the basics are done, we also want our user to be able to:

• search, tag, comment, recommend and rate books in her collective catalog

• get e-mail remembering to return a book, or to ask for a book which is overdue

• arrange the exchange of books, either setting up meetings or scheduling drops

++ Basic entities

The main entities in the Groo system are Users, Books and Items. Users are basically managed and stored by the Horde infrastructure.

+++ Books x Items

What we call a Book in Groo is not a physical object, but rather a certain edition of a work, such as "PHP in a Nutshell, ISBN: 0596100671". An Item is a particular physical instance or exemplar of a Book, such as my own copy of "PHP in a Nutshell". Eventually Items will also refer to DVDs, LPs, CDs.

So Groo has a public database of Books, and private collections of Items, which are the user's book collections. The collections are implemented as Horde shares.