FilmSuggestions.com launches

I love movies, and have always wanted to keep a catalogue of the great ones if only for my own record.

I had the idea for FilmSuggestions.com several years ago – a site where you could create a list of the best movies you’ve seen, and compare them with your friends. I didn’t get around to doing anything about it for a long time – until now. Recently I became interested in Groovy, and then Grails. Finally, Java has a rapid application development platform.

It was important to me that I retain my investment in Java – I love the language, and have been working with it since its early days. I could have easily moved to Ruby/Rails, but now I didn’t have to. I don’t have a lot of time to code applications, mostly sacrificing sleep for the opportunity to add features and start new projects (I’m taking a break from corporate development to raise my son by day, and code by night).

The experience with Grails and Groovy has been great. The only thing I’ve missed is the tools, but apparently Intellij IDEA has released excellent support. The productivity enhancement with Grails is sensational. But more about that in another post.

About FilmSuggestions.com

FilmSuggestions.com is an Amazon based service where you can catalogue films, tagging and commenting as you go. Film collections are public so you may find like minded users whose collections contain movies that you might like, and you can search your collection by tags, actors, directors and title.

Why use FilmSuggestions.com?

1. List your favourite films and compare with your friends
2. Look at your friends collections to get suggestions for your next film to watch
3. Catalogue your home film collection by tagging films you own with ‘own’
4. Keep a record of who you have lent films to by tagging with ‘loanto:???’
5. Tag your collection so you can easily find films with particular qualities – here are some suggested tags:
   • action, comedy, martialarts… (genre based)
   • 5*, 4*, 3* … (rating)
   • own (for films you own)
   • loanto:john (for films you’ve lent to John)
   • mustsee, classic (films you think everyone should watch)

I’m updating it regularly with feature enhancements and bug fixes, and its a great experience to have a web application out there and being used.

Let me know what you think…