Goal

Your aim in this assignment is to develop an “online shopping app” which allows its users to select itemsfrom one or more online retailers to add to a “shopping cart” of purchases. There must be at least two distinct categories of items for sale. The items on offer are extracted from the product lists offered by actual online shops. One category is derived from previously‐ downloaded web documents, and a further one (or more) categories must be based on “live” web documents currently online. The online web documents must be ones that are updated on a regular basis. When users are happy with their selections they must be able to produce an invoice detailing their purchases and the total cost (in Australiandollars).

For the purposes of this assignment you have a free choice of what products your online shopping application will offer. Your application must offer (at least) two clearly‐distinct categories of item. Categories could be:

 clothing,

 electrical goods,

 books and magazines,

 motor vehicles,

 furniture,

 toys and games

 jewellery and cosmetics,

 real estate,

 etc.

However, whatever categories of products you choose, you must be able to find online web documents that contain regularly‐updated lists of such products. The categories could all come from the same online retailer or from two or more different ones.

For each product category the corresponding online web document must include at least ten items for sale at any time. For each item the document must include a product name, a photograph of the product, and a price. A good source for such data is Rich Site Summary (RSS) web‐feed documents. Appendix A below lists many such sites suitable for this assignment, but you are encouraged to find your own of personal interest.  For the “live” product category the chosen web document must be updated regularly, preferably at least once a day.

Using this data source you are required to build an IT system with the following general architecture.

Your online shopping application will be a Python program with a Graphical User Interface. Under the user’s control, it extracts individual elements from two distinct sets of web documents to display the products for sale. One document is static and is stored as an “archive” HTML document. The other source of web documents is the “live” Internet. Your application must offer at least one category of product from an archive, and at least one category of products from the internet. For each category of product there must be at least ten items for sale at any time. Once the user has made their selections via the GUI, your application must generate an HTML “invoice” for the purchases, which is opened automatically in the user's default web browser.