pricefindr blog

Wow … where did that year go? Can’t believe its one year since I put pricefindr.ie live! I probably haven’t done all I had hoped in the year but as something that I do part time the prototype has really proved its worth. During the last few months I have not had enough time to add many new features and content as we’ve welcomed a new arrival into the family. But pricefindr.ie is very much alive and for the year ahead I hope to announce some cool new features and content. Also I intend to market and promote the site (this year’s effort was zero!) I think the real success for the year was the backend technology it has provided itself quite robust. Anyway onwards and upwards

Just to let you know thehut.com has been added to the pricefindr.ie index.

In the past I have found them to have some real bargains on CDs, and DVDs their products should be appearing on the search results.

With the great weather the last while it’s been difficult to spend a lot of time indoors. But over the last week or so I have made some important changes to pricefindr. The first while not immediately visible to the end user is mostly around back end infrastructure. I have successfully moved the pricefindr infrastructure into the cloud. I’m using amazon’s EC2 services overall my first impressions of EC2 are excellent I was up an running in no time. Hopefully the back end improvements will allow for the expansion of the website into other verticals and give a better experience to the user. EC2 is a great offering and is a real enabler for startups etc. and allows you to focus on real innovation while giving you the tools to build a production ready application. Cloud computing is really taking hold as shown with Google’s arrival in the space with their Google app engine offering, although maybe not as flexible as amazon’s at a low level still shows momentum in this whole area.

MashupCamp was held in Dublin last weekend but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to attend. Trying to fit it in around having a personal life, with the day job during the week and hacking on the website is impossible. I suppose I am more an observer from a far in relation to these type of events. I would love to get along to some of the other similar events such as Barcamp Ireland and OpenCoffee Dublin I am a real fan of the culture around these events and the type of energy they generate hopefully I get to one in the future.

By all accounts MashupCamp went pretty well with a large international attendance with some of us Irish turning up as well (maybe not in the numbers we should have!). I find the whole area of mashups very interesting it is and will be one of the key areas for the next wave of webapps.

For me the main thing required from websites to allow mashups to be build round them is access to data. I think that Tim O’Reilly hit the nail on the head with his expression “its the data stupid!“. With greater data mobilitly we will be able to build some really exiting web apps in the future. Just look at the great mashups alright build on existing available APIs now imagine how these will evolve as more data becomes available.

How does this relate to pricefindr? well I hope in the future to add the same data accessibiltiy and mobility to pricefindr although not much demand for it now (traffic isn’t exactly setting the world on fire!) who knows in the future maybe we’ll have a whole set of mashups based around pricefindr data. To be honest I don’t think it would take much of an effort to start offering some of these types of services thanks to nutch and its support for OpenSearch RSS. Something else to look into when i get some time…

Just to give a flavor of some of the technologies that go into building pricefindr. For the day job as an engineer most of my development is in Java/J2EE building enterprise systems. I have been using java for over 10 years so you won’t be to surprised to know that the majority of pricefindr is developed using java. A number of excellent open source projects go into the site, the main ones being

• lucene (used as the search engine, it is a full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java)
• nutch (build on top of lucene, used to crawl and index the various websites)
• jetty (an excellent lightweight HTTP web server and Servlet Container, the website is powered by it)
• springframework (used as the glue, pulls together the various components behind the scenes)
• ubuntu (the operating system behind it all, a great Linux distribution)

There are many other bits and pieces behind the scenes but don’t want to give a geek overload right now. I’ll expand and go into more detail on some of the above in the future.