Portfolio: Wootoscope
Wootoscope is a cross-platform Java/Swing/XML (GUI application) application to monitor the shopping site woot.com. Woot is a unique online shopping experience where, on normal days, the website sells one product for the entire day, until they run out, or 12:00am CST. Their product descriptions are very humerous, and they have several more focused spinoff websites, like wine.woot.com, shirt.woot.com, and kids.woot.com. Many of their products are refurbished or overstocks, and the prices are almost always very good. A running user blog lets the Woot community talk about each product and share information on it. Every now and then, Woot has a special event called a Woot-Off, which is a rapid-fire sale of one product until it runs out, then another one goes on sale. One must act fast to get the more popular items.
Several applications exist to monitor the woot item currently on sale, especially during woot-offs. However, there are no stand-alone applications that run natively on Linux. There are browser plugins, and there are Windows applications that run (mostly) through Wine, but none that simply work in Linux. In part, this project is to fill this need, and in part it is a vehicle for becoming stronger in Swing applications, since most of my experience has been on web applications. When finished, I will release this application as Open Source.
This project is currently in the design stage. I will update this page as it progresses.
