What is novel?

This project is a full-featured online novel reading website built as a learning resource. It is written in Chinese and designed to teach developers how to build a production-grade Java web application from scratch, with step-by-step tutorials accompanying the code. The project covers everything from setting up the backend to deploying the finished site. The platform has three main parts: a public-facing novel portal where readers browse and read books, an author backend where writers manage their works, and a platform admin panel for site operators. Reader-facing features include novel recommendations, search, ranked lists, chapter reading, comments, a member center, author profile pages, paid subscriptions, and a news section. On the server side, the project uses Spring Boot 3 and a database toolkit called MyBatis to handle data storage in MySQL. Redis is used to keep frequently accessed data in fast memory so pages load quickly. Optional components include Elasticsearch for full-text search, RabbitMQ for background task messaging, and a scheduling tool called XXL-JOB for timed jobs. The frontend is built with Vue 3, a JavaScript framework for building interactive web pages. The repository also links to several related versions of the same project: a production-ready extended version called novel-plus, a microservices version called novel-cloud, and a matching frontend repository. This lets learners start with the simpler core project and then explore more advanced architectures once they are comfortable with the basics. The README is written entirely in Chinese, so readers who do not read Chinese will need a translation tool to follow the setup instructions and tutorials. The project has over 5,700 GitHub stars, suggesting it is a well-regarded teaching resource in the Chinese Java development community.