Smart Shopping Application for Android Users
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Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
With the development of the technology, most of the people tend to use electrical items for their
day to day activities. Mobile phone is the most popular electrical item among them. Most of the
people use smart phones now. On the other hand shopping has become an intrinsic part of
everyday life.
With the advent of the mobile phone era and the frequent use of mobile apps to perform
everyday tasks, the trend to use apps for creating and managing shopping lists is becoming more
popular by the day. The purpose of creating price comparison application is to efficiently
manage time and money while shopping. This application includes electrical items like mobile
phones, Televisions, laptops, etc. By using this application users can identify the lowest price
providers in Sri Lanka for the selected item and information about them.
Methodology
This application basically related with mobile application development with web services (Code
on cloud, 2013). The development of the application was started with the UI designing. Eclipse
Android Development Tool Kit (ADT) was used to design the application interfaces. The
Jellybean was used as the android version, sdk and Samsung galaxy and android virtual devices
(AVDs) as the testing devices. Android API level was 2.2 to 4.2.
For the data mining purpose, some websites which are publishing electrical items’ prices and
detail were selected. Using PHP and cURL library, data were extracted from those selected
websites. DOM Document and xpath helped to find the location where the details were located.
It was sent XML type data. The methods trim and slice were used to find correct values. Then it
was converted into the JSON arrays. Those data were stored and hosted by using the
000webhostingfree webhosting. When user requested data, through the web services, it was
parsing to the android application. AsyncTask was used to fetch data from web service.
Application was decoded the JSON data and displayed on the User interface. It was tested
several times to find bugs and was fixed the bugs found during the test phase.
Figure 1 depicts the simple architecture of the application with all the modules described above.
Result and Discussion
It was easy to use eclipse ADT bundle to develop android applications. The emulator provided
different types of virtual devices to test application. However, the actual devices run time period
speed was faster than the emulator. cURL library and PHP was very useful for web mining
processes. Using xpath it can easily be identified the correct path to the value. Sometime it was
difficult to fetch data as most of the websites use their own structure. According to above
designs, web services were developed even though it was difficult to handle.
Conclusions
Here prototype of the application has been developed. It was successfully fetched data from
websites and displayed on android application. With that, anyone can engage with the dealers
and develop the application for them. Then easily we can update the data and can maintain the
updated information. It will help the user to get correct decisions when buying electrical items.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science, Technology, Science and Technology, Smart Shopping Application