KnowWay!

Gamified educational resource browser. Get score by reading Wikipedia or reading old books on Polona!

Software Engineering University Project by Dominik Zimny

Basic functionalities

Allows you to host a HTTP server that will contain simple website. Currently implemented functionalities:

register, login
search and browse: Wikipedia articles and Polona book scans.
receiving points for browsing those resources
show popular resources and top users with the highest number of points
save information about users locally

How to run?

Requirements

Python3
Flask_WTF==0.14.3
Flask==1.1.2
wikipedia==1.4.0
WTForms==2.3.1
requests==2.23.0

Python3 - install from https://www.python.org/downloads/
Flask - pip install Flask on Windows CMD, or use guide: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/installation/ We won't need virtual environment since project doesn't have many dependencies.
Flask_WTF - pip install Flask-WTF
requests - pip install requests
WTForms - pip install WTForms
Wikipedia API - pip install wikipedia or use guide: https://pypi.org/project/wikipedia/

Instruction

Add environmental variable at /src FLASK_APP=server.py Run server.py with cmd using python.exe <directory>/server.py and go http://127.0.0.1:5000/ in your browser.

Known problems, bugs etc.

Despite web-app working correctly most of the time, there are some things that should be considered for future development:

it is easy to cheat by sending POST requests that you were browsing resource for some peroid of time (check it on the server-side)
lack of security while register and login, consider adding a "I am not a robot" checker
some Polona scans are searched with query that ensures the found books are public, yet API returns some non-public ones, sometimes an error should appear
Wikipedia pages are loaded on server and then send to the user browsing it, so loading times are a little bit longer than browsing in directly on Wikipedia, same goes for Polona books
loading a resource for a first time makes it recalculate max points: depending on the resource this may take a little bit longer to load
data base makes rankings and updates stats every minute, if you are expecting a larger number of users, make it less frequent

Ideefixze / knowway_server