Ruby/Rails program for my family #1

Since our son was born (8/2007), we often bought second hand toys for our son on the Internet. Sometimes we could get some items very easy with reasonable price. But sometimes it's so difficult, because the item which we want is very popular thing among the mommys.

We were used to keep observation on mommy's community site in naver, daum and so on. And when we want something for our son (of course, only when we want second hand things), we should check those web sites (especially bulletin board) manually several times in a day. It's a so painful hobby, because of timing issue. When very popular item is posted in the sites, it is sold very quickly, even though reading count of the post is less than 10. If we colud access in time, we colud make a phone call to seller and negociated.

Recent item is a baby coupe. It's ordinally price is so expensive (around $150!), but second hand's price is about $50. So we started keeping observation on one site. However, I already mentioned above. it's not interest work. So two days ago I made a decision that make a program for us. I decided use ruby and rails. I thought it can be helpful to remove our painful hobby and increase my ruby and rails skill. And, yes, it's so helpful for us. It makes us so happy! Ha ha.

Below is the architecture. I'll grab the target page by ruby program that is ran by cron. Then the program input datas to Rails application through ActiveResouce. Of course, I will make RESTFul  service with Rails. Finally, the rails application will generate rss feed, so my wife can watch so fresh posting list which my ruby program graped by RSS reader.

Continue to next time....