Inspiration
We wanted to do a fun project which had personal use. Whenever we have movie nights with friends, its difficult to decide what to watch. Wampus is useful for these sorts of situations.
What it does
Wampus reads up to 100 of the top rated films of a genre from Metacritic. It classifies each into sub-genres. Thumbing up a film will make those subgenres appear toward the front of the set of movies. Thumbing them down will move similar films to the back.
How we built it
Wampus was built entirely in Java using the Jsoup library to scrape web data from Metacritic. The GUI was built using Java's Swing toolkit. We got the name Wampus from the Wampus Cat, an American folklore creature.
Challenges we ran into
It was particularly difficult to make the program wait for inputs from Swing components. No one on the team had ever used JSoup or Swing before this project, so the entire thing was a learning process. The types of data structures used were changed along the way as well. Implementing the comparable interface was also interesting. Deciding how to evaluate the genre weights was a unique challenge.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we were able to finish the project to just about our original vision. It was getting scary toward the end, but good thinking and time dedication finished the project.
What we learned
Other than learning about how to use Jsoup and Swing (Jsoup is very useful!), we learned a lot about project time management. Mistakes were made, but we still finished strong! Albeit we finished late into the night.
What's next for Wampus
Wampus can already read other types of pages from Metacritic (e.g. TV shows) pretty well. Increasing the modularity of Wampus and adding new features is the obvious way forward. There's potential to add video games, music, etc. into the Wampus framework. Of course, it could also use some prettying up.
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