A Brief History of the Book Library

This article is written in response to a couple of incredulous emails I received about my recent publication of a handbook for the Book Library, which seemed like a lot of work documenting an application in use by two people, with no hopes of ever being used by more.

The Book Library as it is today is a Windows-only application built with Atlas, a Borland Delphi-based framework available from Opus Software AG.

I used to work at Opus, and the Book Library is the application I wrote to get a feel for how Atlas was to use “in the real world” – I believe a lot of the improvements in Atlas 2.5 stemmed from that work. :-) At the same time, I included an XML-importer for an old, crappy Access database I wrote a looooonnnng time ago, back in NYC when I barely knew a database from a hole in the ground. Using the importer, I managed to get most of my well-documented book library into the new, shiny application with no data entry. Having nearly 800 books documented and cross-indexed is a pretty big inertia that prevents me from moving to some online solution or some other software (like the fancy-looking Delicious Library 2). Data-entry in the current version is a snap and it does what it needs to.

Shortly after I wrote the Book Library, I finally had had enough of watching my mother enter her data into a “database”[1], so I wrote an importer for that too—a highly-customized work of art, it turns out—and there her data sits to this day. She nodded happily as I showed her the new application, then forgot all about it for a couple of years, continuing to add to the old database.

I discovered that this summer and resolved to attack the problem of migrating her to a new application with extensive documentation; thus, the experiment I wrote recently (the aforementioned Book Library handbook). I was also happy to discover that my self from 2005 had an inkling that this would happen and I’d written not just an importer, but a sync that ignored duplicates. Oh frabjous day! I could re-import her data without changing a line of code! So, I sent her the handbook and the new database, with my fingers crossed.

So, that’s the reason there’s such a detailed handbook and also the reason the Book Library is not available for download: because it’s written with proprietary Opus technology for which I no longer have a de-facto commercial developer’s license. Atlas, however, is just the latest skin to wrap this data, some of which, as mentioned in the footnote, is two decades old.

The plan, of course, is to rebuild it with Quino, a C#-framework I helped develop at my company, Encodo Systems. Quino is actually more than ready to go for replicating the Windows application, but … you know … the web’s sooooo cool these days and Quino web-support is getting there as well. The Book Library waited twenty years; it can wait a little while longer.