Pedro Vides
CSCI E-259
04/13/2006

Proposal:


i. Title
Supermarket Helper

ii. Authors
Pedro Vides

iii. Abstract
Have you ever gone to the store to pick up a few items and end up taking an eternity trying to find those few things while making impulse buys because of all the walking around?  Wouldn't it be nice if you could easily organize your shopping list based on the store layout?  

iv. What
This application will take as input a grocery list and output a route of a chosen supermarket.  The route will consist of the grocery items sorted by grocery store isle number.  The grocery stores in the database will be created by any user and will be modified by any user.  Finally, the user will be able to get to all this through a website.

v. Why
I believe that solving this problem will save the user time and money.  The user will save time by having a grocery store route that will tell them exactly where all their grocery store items are.  They will also save money because they will not make impulse buys while wondering through the store.

vi. How
The project will consist of 2 main parts.  The server which will interact with the database consisting of XML files and the servlets which will create webpages dynamically for a user.  The user will be able able to do two main things through their web browser.  They will be able to create a grocery list route by using the servlets which will actually compute the route.  They will also be able to create new grocery store layouts through servlets as well.  The servlets will talk to the database to compute the route and also to save a new grocery store layout or to modify a grocery store layout.  The grocery store layout would consist of the grocery store, address, and many isles which will each have grocery store items by category and/or by product name.

I think a big part of the project will be trying to figure out how to do a search of the database (XML files) to find the grocery store items.  The user's query could be pretty much anything: product's name, maker of the product, type of item, category for item, etc.  So the searching of the XML files may be complicated and would need some planning.

vii. Questions
My main concern is that the project as it stands will not fulfill enough requirements.