LawrenceT
Lurker
I want to find a developer to create an app that can run on both android and iOS platforms so need some advice before I start looking...
The user would tell the app what item they are looking to buy by choosing a number of set criteria from drop down lists on the app screen.
The app would interrogate a number of niche online shops/stores (initially about 20) to find the desired product, and a list of stores and prices would be displayed in tabular format, cheapest at the top.
These niche stores have prices which can change a number of times during the day.
I know that some sort of periodic/ scheduled web scraping will have to take place to harvest the price data at certain times during the day.
I envisage that this price data along with the relevent product data will have to be stored on a database somewhere which can be accessed by the app once a user runs a price query.
So initial questions are:
1. What would be the best application dev software to use for a dual mobile platform end result? E.g. flutter etc
2. Would an external database being accessed and queried by the app be the best way to go?
3. If so what type of database would be best for this?
4. How best could the web scraping be achieved with a view to storing in database suggested in 3 above?
Scale-wise I am initially looking at scraping from 20 websites each having approx 100-200 same-comparable-products which would be price compared and the top 10 cheapest offerings then displayed to the user.
Any help and guidance in steering me in the right direction is greatly appreciated[/QUOTE]
The user would tell the app what item they are looking to buy by choosing a number of set criteria from drop down lists on the app screen.
The app would interrogate a number of niche online shops/stores (initially about 20) to find the desired product, and a list of stores and prices would be displayed in tabular format, cheapest at the top.
These niche stores have prices which can change a number of times during the day.
I know that some sort of periodic/ scheduled web scraping will have to take place to harvest the price data at certain times during the day.
I envisage that this price data along with the relevent product data will have to be stored on a database somewhere which can be accessed by the app once a user runs a price query.
So initial questions are:
1. What would be the best application dev software to use for a dual mobile platform end result? E.g. flutter etc
2. Would an external database being accessed and queried by the app be the best way to go?
3. If so what type of database would be best for this?
4. How best could the web scraping be achieved with a view to storing in database suggested in 3 above?
Scale-wise I am initially looking at scraping from 20 websites each having approx 100-200 same-comparable-products which would be price compared and the top 10 cheapest offerings then displayed to the user.
Any help and guidance in steering me in the right direction is greatly appreciated[/QUOTE]