📘 Book Recommender – Project Progress

A microservice-based application that allows users to get AI-powered book recommendations and save them to a personal collection.

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✅ What’s Been Implemented

🔹 1. Book API Service (User Service)

• Built using Spring Boot
• Connects to a local PostgreSQL database
• Allows saving book information using JPA
• API endpoint(s) to:
  • Save book details
  • Retrieve saved books (if implemented)

🔹 2. Recommendation Service (OpenAI Integration)

• Built as a separate Spring Boot microservice
• Accepts user input as a prompt (e.g. genre, interests)
• Sends requests to the OpenAI API (gpt-3.5-turbo)
• Returns generated book recommendations to the frontend or consumer

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🚧 What Needs to Be Done Next

🔸 Backend

• Implement Firebase Admin SDK to validate user tokens in both services
• Link saved book records to Firebase UID
• Add GET endpoint to retrieve user's saved books
• Format OpenAI responses into a clean structure (title, author, summary)

🔸 Frontend (Angular)

• Set up Angular project with routing and Bootstrap
• Implement Firebase Authentication (email/password)
• Build UI for:
  • Asking for book recommendations
  • Displaying OpenAI-generated results
  • Saving a book to the backend
  • Viewing saved book list

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📦 Microservices Summary

Service	Description
book-recommendation-service	Handles OpenAI API interaction for book suggestions
user-favorite-service	Stores and retrieves user book data (PostgreSQL)

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🌱 Future Enhancements

• Add tags or genres to books
• Allow users to rate or comment on saved books
• Deploy frontend (Firebase Hosting) and backend (Render/Railway)

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