The Lab Rats are a team of sophomores from Northeastern University who wanted to make something practical; something we all felt would have helped make our transition to college easier, along with being able to currently help us for the rest of our years here.We thought, what contributes to experience more than what we eat? We know the struggle of a broke college student trying to find the best deals around, and we also were frustrated with the lack of a single source to compare prices. That's when we decided to create SimpliShop, a platform which actively sweeps the web finding prices from a variety of Boston supermarkets and puts it all in one easy-to-navigate website. Simply type in the item you want, and you will be presented with a list of results from nearby companies so you can can find all the best deals!
For this project, we learned to utilize the powerful Web Scraping software from UIPath, which we used to obtain our grocery store data. We then compiled all of this data in several sequel databases, queried through the databases using sql on a MySQL server, and tied everything together with a React front end, which we also had no prior experience using.
Our initial commits were nothing but small additions we found online added to a Create-React-App generated React App. Over time, as we got to understand the power of React, we refactored all of our code and started an object oriented approach. This greatly simplified the planning process and significantly increased code readability and overall quality.
There were numerous challenges that we faced throughout the project. The first challenge was that all grocery store websites are different, meaning that the UIPath scraping software did not work the same from website to website. Because of this, we had to make some python scripts to sanitize the data that the software gave to us. Once we had our CSV's and made some simple queries to find the data in a database according to a searchword, our biggest challenge was outputting the query data into a useable form that the react frontend could use. At the very end of our development process (as I am typing this now), we have created a javascript file that can ouput the search results for our four companies (Target, Wholefoods, StopnShop, Starmarket) into a JSON file that can be viewed via a GET Request in the React Frontend, but at this point we are out of time (and half asleep) so we were unable to fully finish.
If we had a couple more hours as a team, we would have been able to finish the project (Connect the working front-end and back-end) and polish the front-end. However, as this is a Hackathon, we feel confident that we made a viable proof-of-concept that can be worked on in the future.
Some additional features we should add if we were working on this project over a longer span: The ability to search for multiple items via separation in the searchbar by comma (this would allow the user to take a look at the overall prices of goods they want and choose what store to go from there), The addition of more stores and products (In this proof-of-concept, we only included four stores and the items from their produce section), as well as a possible addition of a Google Maps API to show the locations of the stores relative to the user.
Overall, since we never used most of the technologies that we coded with in the project, we are pretty proud of how far we came, and our mistakes on the way will allow us to build better data-based web applications in the future.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.