Grocery Pricer

GROP

Problem:

Grocery shopping is a computationally “hard” problem for humans in regards to trying to act in a deterministic fashion to always purchase items at the lowest price. Basically it’s difficult to figure out what the lowest price is because our memories cannot remember the best prices for every single item in every single grocery store.

Solution:

GROP! This application is meant to store the prices of prior transactions in order to provide a means by which users can utilize past empirical experience (previous transactions) in order to more concretely know whether they are purchasing at a good price or not. Hopefully it will be useful to you! If not, let me know (you should know how to contact me already if you are at this site).

[2007-02-05]
Added some new functionality to the adding of data so that there will be less user calculations. Simply add what you paid, the number of units (i.e. ounces), and the unit type and calculations will be done for you. Working on improving the viewing functionality so that more useful data can be seen.
Also thinking about getting my feet wet sometime in the AJAX realm. Though it’s obviously not necessary since the program is fairly simply, it will add to the end user’s usability as well as give me some experience in the area. This will be a topic for a future revision I think. For now I want to add the ability to search rather than have to slog through my database table joins.

[2007-04-12]
Haven’t touched this program in a looooong time but I want to pick it up again. I did some simple server directives so that it’s now http://prices.goingthewongway.com/. Going to learn how to work it into a more user-friendly application with AJAX as that definitely seems like it’ll help the day-to-day use (from experience). Currently there is just too much clicking that has to be done because of the simple HTML forms that make up the pages.

[2007-05-15]
Right now I just finished re-organizing the code. They are now in separate files for the most part. Additionally I created some more useful functions to handle the creation of the drop-down boxes. Right now I’m sort of at a standstill because I’m not quite sure what my next step should be. I’m thinking that I might want to start implementing AJAX functionality. At the same time I’m also thinking that adding “Cancel” buttons in addition to “Submit” buttons might be a nice change so I could make a move right now instead of waiting.

[2007-06-01]
Decided that the name should be GROP. That is all.