word-trainer

This is a simple vocabulary trainer. It uses publicly available vocabulary lists of Bavarian school books. I wrote the app to practice my Spring Boot and Thymeleaf skills. It was successfully used by my daughter in grade 6 before too many bugs and feature requests collided with too little spare time. Currently deployed on Heroku: https://word-trainer-test-3b93bf2b34e4.herokuapp.com/

user credentials:

• username: user, password: user
• username: teacher, password: teacher
• username: admin, password: admin

cool features:

• periodically creates AI-generated English audio for words/sentences (and updates these audios if cards are changed)
• accepts (manually defined) synonyms/alternative spellings
• better diff for wrongly entered translations than most other apps
• uses original vocabulary lists of school books
• adds new vocabulary in interval to make sure all words are added till summer break
• keep Heroku dyno awake so it does not need time to wake up
• repetition intervals can be changed by environment variable
• extended logging
• feedback form to report faulty cards
• uses Renovate to automatically update dependencies

things to improve:

• write more unit tests
• improve UI
• use client-side rendering framework like React or Angular
• fetch synonyms/alternative spellings dynamically from Thesaurus API
• improve loading times by using Spring Boot Caching
• load vocabulary from JSON files
• improve TestContainers load time
• shown diff if input was wrong could be further improved
• use a more sophisticated algorithm to schedule repetitions (e.g. FSRS)
• add gamification (points/streaks/avatars)
• more (relevant) statistics

TODO

• before adding admin operations (e.g. removing/adding cards) change/remove test users

Connect to db

Local: docker exec -it word-trainer-postgres psql -U word-trainer
Test: heroku pg:psql -a word-trainer-test

Run tests and generate JaCoCo report: mvn clean test

Adding new cards

converting

• … --> ...
• ' --> ''
• ’ --> ''

add more possible solutions

• (sg)
• (pl)
• a/ (e.g. a/one hundred)
• to do, did, done --> move into separate cards
• You're welcome. --> also accept 'You are welcome.'

Database backups and moving

move database to a new provider (e.g. ElephantSql to Heroku Postgres)

1. download sql-file from old provider (was in the lzop backup over UI) source
2. start app and let Flyway migrations happen
3. heroku pg:psql --app app-name < db.sql
4. problem is that somehow the is_approved column of cards is not updated correctly, so we have to check select is_approved, count(*) from cards group by is_approved; and then probably do word-trainer-live::DATABASE=> update cards set is_approved = true where card_id in (select distinct card_id from solve_attempts where user_id = 5);

pg_backup and restore

1. pg_dump -Fp --no-acl --no-owner <DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING > mydb.dump
2. docker exec -i word-trainer-postgres psql -U word-trainer -d word-trainer < mydb.dump

heroku postgres backup

heroku pg:backups:capture -a word-trainer-live