Re: [NUSHackers] NUSMods.com - Unofficial NUS Module Finder and Timetable Builder

[Eli]

Hey Beng, 

Nice to see you finally posting this. It was an awesome piece of work the first time you showed it to me and RC, and it's only gotten better. :) 

(And oh so useful at this time of the semester)

Thanks so much for building this!

On 19 July 2012 22:01, Beng <ahbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi guys,

Here's something I've been hacking on which you may find useful - http://nusmods.com

Some of you may have seen an early version last sem, but I didn't touch it until recently, since the time for CORS is coming round again.

Crawling and post-processing are done with node.js, server bit's not needed yet for the features out now cos the module info's all compressed into a .js file. Frontend stuff's written with Coffeescript, LESS and Jade.

I'll post code on Github when I've time to clean it up and make it properly buildable by others. May take awhile, as my workflow makes use of paid tools, so it's a bit of a pain to translate to something which everyone can use - Grunt, probably?

I'd love to hear suggestions for improvement! [=

Beng

[ymichael]

This is so awesome...

[Joey Cody]

This is soooo sweet Beng! I wish I was using it this year...

I'd love to take a peek at the source code to see how it's all powered.

Is the crawling all done through the IVLE API or are you scraping the site for content?

- Joey

[Beng]

Thanks guys! [=

I'm in the process of transitioning my build processes over to Grunt, once that's done running "npm install && grunt" should suffice to get all the build dependencies and build everything.

So yes Joey, you'll get your peek soon! (Sometime this weekend, hopefully)

Everything's scraped, IVLE API does have some functions which might have been useful, like to directly provide lecturer/lesson plan/textbook info for example, but sadly a lot of this data seems to be either missing or not up-to-date if it is to be integrated with the full set of modules listed in CORS/NUS Bulletin (~10k modules!). Anyway that's not due to the API itself, can't really expect the IVLE datasets to be as organized as CORS/NUS Bulletin.

[Jeffery Tay]

That is interesting to hear, NUS Bulletin actually belongs to IVLE so both our datasets are the same, as for CORS, it links back to the same backend db as IVLE.

so by right all of 3 will show the exact information. Quite possibly you are calling the wrong api function which does not give you what you are looking at, you might wanna drop me an email at t...@nus.edu.sg and lets see how to work this out.

The reason why i prefer you to call the API is that all the information you have now is fluid, they are not finalized for a few weeks more, so i rather you guys pull from the right data rather than scraping

[Beng]

Just a quick note: source is on github: https://github.com/ahbeng/NUSMods

A long weekend put to good use. Feel free to hack away!

[Kaung Htet Zaw]

Sweet!

-- 

Sincerely yours,

Kaung Htet Zaw

[Eli]

This is frigging awesome. Thanks, Beng.

[Joey Cody]

Wooooot! Great documentation as well!