Inspiration
One of our teammates tried to sell a second-hand football ticket yesterday, and she had to promote it on three different social media apps in order to find a buyer. We think it would be more efficient to just create a single concentrated platform specifically designed for USC students and faculty to sell and buy second-hand items
What it does
It's a platform for only USC students and faculty members to sell and buy second-hand items
How we built it
We designed the ideal version of the app (front end only) with Sketch and created the functioning prototype with Java. We don't have a login page for the prototype, so we play God and therefore can add users to or delete them from the user database. We can look up different users to switch between the perspectives in order to show how the buying and selling works. There's also a database (the data structure is HashMap) for items available for sale. If the user adds an item, it goes into the database, and if deleted it is removed from the database. When a user purchases the item it is also removed from the database. At the same time, it is also removed from its owner's list of items available for sale.
Challenges we ran into
We only implemented the transaction part. When an item is purchased it is not taken care of. We simply just remove it from the database
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We get the profile database and item database to work correctly. There are two error-prone and confusing parts. When a profile gets deleted, the items set available for sale by that owner should all be removed from the database. Also, when an item is purchased, it should be removed from its original owner's list of items. Through choosing the correct data structures we managed to get these two parts working correctly.
What's next for USCBuys
Technically speaking, We definitely need to improve the prototype to correctly handle the items purchased instead of simply just removing it from the database. We also need to create a login page to restrict the perspective to only a single user's perspective rather than playing God and switching between different users. Since our app needs to function based on a large number of users, we need to promote it to the entire university to get more users to register on this app.
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