strandlie / EC-Shop

Result project from NTNU Course TDT4140. Owner- and user interface for a checkout-less store.

    E.C. Shop 🍎 🥓 🍔 🥙

This is a school project developed associated with the subject TDT4140 at NTNU.

E.C. Shop is a system for tracking customers in a store, similarly to systems such as Amazon's Amazon Go. The system tracks customer inventories as they move through the store, and automatically charges their credit cards upon leaving the store with goods. The system also provides customers with data such as recommended items, and shop owners with statistics about their shop such as items in stock, and visualizations of customer movements throughout the shop.

• Feature Overciew
  • Service providers
  • Data providers
• Installation
• System Architecture

Feature overview

Features for service providers / shop owners

Most of the features for service providers are shown in the owner application user interface.

• In the first tab, owners can see stats describing how often items are picked up, so that you can see which items are popular.
• In the second tab, owners can see how many items are remaining, so that you know when restocking is needed.
• The Demographics tab provides information about the customers visiting the shop.
• The Shelves tab shows information about how many items are on shelves in the shop, so that shop workers know when to move items to the front of the store again.
• The HeatMap and Plot tabs shows how customers move in the store, and which areas of the store usually have the largest amount of people. This can aid with the placement of items.

Features for data providers / customers

The main feature for customers is automatically being charged for your picked up goods when leaving store. In addition, our service provides multiple endpoints providing recommendations for items to buy and descriptions of your shopping habits.

Installation

To install the application for local development on your machine, start by cloning the repo by issuing the following command in the terminal.

git clone https://gitlab.stud.iie.ntnu.no/tdt4140-2018/64.git

This project is configured for development with Eclipse, and so we recommend you download Eclipse and import the project into your Eclipse installation.

To import the project, right click the Project Explorer and select Import. Select Maven, and use the directory named 64 which you just cloned as the root directory. Clicking Finish should complete the importing of the project. We reccomend installing Eclipse using the guide for the TDT4100 course at NTNU, but using the setup file found here instead. This installation includes Maven, and a plethora of other plugins as well.

Once the repository has been downloaded, cd into the directory. Then run the following command in order to download all dependencies using Maven.

mvn clean install

You should see the test suite running. If all tests pass, the project is fully functional. Once this is done, you can start the application. The module app is responsible for starting the application. Open the app package and run the app class directly. This will start the web server and the owner application. To cleanly close the entire application, simply close the owner application user interface.

System architecture

The project is split into two main parts, app.core and app.ui. The app.core package contains all the business logic such as computing receipts and all the database handling/persistence, while app.ui contains the JavaFX code for the owner user interface. Inside app.core, most of the business logic such as computing receipts and modeling shopping trips resides in tdt4140.gr1864.app.core. The package tdt4140.gr1864.app.core.databasecontrollers contains code responsible for interfacing with the database. The tdt4140.gr1864.app.core.datamocker package is a standalone system for generating fake yet reasonable shopping trips for local testing purposes, and tdt4140.gr1864.app.core.interfaces contains interfaces used in different parts of the system.

The web.server module uses its own instance of app.core to pass and receive data from customers. An external customer application could interact with the relevant data through this REST API. Documentation is found here.

The app module is responsible for starting and stopping the system cleanly.

List of tools we've used

• Jetty - a http server and servlet engine used as webserver
• Java servlet - a java program for web server
• GitLab - the core program for this project with it's version control using Git.
• Apache Maven - Dependency manager that describes how the programs are built and their dependencies and is used for automatically project building.
• PostMan - API development environment to send http requests
• Insomnia - Rest API client with cookie management, environment variables and code generation and authentication.
• Eclipse - An open source IDE that is primarly used to develop in this project
• JavaFX - A set of graphics and media packages.
• JDBC - Short for Java Database Connectivity and is a standardized interface for java applications that communicates with a database.