Shopping List

Inspiration

The app was inspired by deals hunters. These people will never miss an opportunity to save money on any of their purchases.

What It Does

This android app is designed to sift through the flyers of most major food and convenience stores to ensure that the user gets the best deal. All the user has to do it enter what products they are willing to purchase in the easy to use interface. The will look at all the locations that offer the product and responds with the best place to purchase all the necessary items. Navigating through the interface you can find further detail about how much money you are saving and how much you need to spend.

How We Built It

We designed the back end of the app by using a apache2 server with php to text rake the embedded html/json/js code in each of the online stores flyers. We took this data and ran it though a special nested array parser and output this sorted organized data into a .csv file that was sent to a google cloud sql database where the csv was stored into a mysql database. The front end of this app was developed in Android Studio (java), we focused on a clean simple design to display our data. We also developed an auto suggest feature to help the user select the products in a more convenient fashion. This java development front end utilized an extensive use of get and push requests to a remote google server where php scripts were set up to pipe information from the sql database to the users device in a way to minimize computation time on the users device.

Challenges We Ran Into

For the back end a very big wall i ran into was companies storing their product information in a very wide range of ways, often specifically designed to prevent data collections of this nature.

Accomplishments

Setting up a multi-input php script that uses smart thinking to parse the incoming data arrays with very minimal if any modification from the programmer when adding a new store.

What We Learned

A wide variety of things including the correct way to format json requests

What's next for Shopping List

We are both surprised and extremely pleased by the success we had with our app! We can't wait to move forward with the development in the hopes of creating a staple app in everyones phone!

Built With

• android-studio
• app-engine
• cloud-sql
• mysql
• php