Teacher Book Wizard

Scholastic is the world's largest publisher and distributor of children's books and a leader in educational technology. Scholastic has annual revenues of over $2 billion, over 10,000 employees worldwide, and publishes numerous popular titles, including the Harry Potter® series. The eScholastic division of the company receives nearly 730 million page views a year and approximately 5 million unique visits a month from teachers, families, and kids.

The Challenge

The web has a number of search engines with book information. However, very few of these search engines focus specifically on children’s books. As the largest publisher of children’s books and educational resources, Scholastic wanted to leverage its expertise in this domain and create the definitive online resource for children’s book information, named the Teacher Book Wizard™ (TBW). Scholastic's goal for TBW was to provide users with rich, detailed content, personalized book recommendations similar to those which would be offered by a children’s librarian, and the opportunity to purchase books through Scholastic's existing eCommerce platform.

In addition, Scholastic wanted TBW to bring together teachers and experts to share classroom-tested booklists in a Web 2.0-based community. Scholastic envisioned these shared booklists as a way for teachers and reading experts to promote literacy for children everywhere.

The Solution

For the Teacher Book Wizard web application, Tallan led the design and implementation of the business and data tiers and developed the website’s pages using designs and artifacts provided by a Tallan partner. TBW runs on top of an Enterprise Java platform and utilizes best-of-breed technologies throughout the system, from the browser down to the database.

For the presentation layer, Tallan used JavaServer Pages (JSP) and the JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) and incorporated AJAX technology to provide a rich client experience for all TBW users. The standard Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern was implemented using SpringMVC, which forwards each user request to Spring Framework-managed JavaBeans containing the business logic. All data access is routed through a data access layer implemented with Hibernate that manages object-relational mappings between the Spring Beans and entities within the DB2 database.

Some of the key features within the TBW application are the multiple search options. The TBW application contains not one, but three, separate search options for users: Quick Search, Leveled Search, and BookAlike™. The Quick Search is a straight keyword search which queries book metadata such as title, author and description. The Leveled Search is an advanced search, which allows users to search by combinations of book attributes such as interest level, reading level, language, subject, and genre. The final search option, BookAlike™, allows users to choose one particular book and then have the system search for additional books that are similar. Using Endeca as the search platform of choice, the Tallan development team worked closely with Endeca consultants to ensure that the site returned accurate results, handled a variety of complex search criteria, and provided quick response times. Regardless of how users find books on the site, they are able to view detailed book information, purchase books, and/or add books to one or more of their booklists.