Everydiy

Note:

• This project was originally named “Lightcart”.
• Treemerge is a tool that was built for this project.

What is Lightcart?

Its a search engine for DIY products available on diy.com (B&Q), homebase.co.uk, screwfix.com and wickes.co.uk. The idea is to enable you to shop at all stores from one fast and focused interface. Once you have a list of items you want to purchase in your cart you are redirected to the suppliers site’s checkout page ready for you to pay.

The target users are people who have many things to purchase and want a quick and easy way to see what is available at all the DIY stores without jumping from tab to tab.

The name “Light” was chosen after the 3 attributes I wanted the application to have:

• Fast
  • As in “lightening fast”.
• Comprehensive
  • Light enables sight.
  • Seeing results from all suppliers.
• Intuitive
  • As in “light entertainment”.
  • Easy to understand/use.

2010 research project revisited

This is the implementation of a research project I had for my degree dissertation in 2010 (titled “The possibilities and limitations of a meta shopping basket”). The original project was written in PHP with very little Javascript. Cross site XMLHttpRequests were sent with signed Java applets.

2015 technologies enabled a faster application

ReactJS/Javascript was used in a “single page” style application. ReactJS has a focus on fast DOM updates. The aim for the project was to keep application responses under 100ms.

A Chrome extension was used in place of a Java Applet to make the add to cart process much smoother.

Screenshots