JBidWatcher: Open Source Software – eBay sniping, bidding & monitoring software.
A Java-based application allowing you to monitor auctions you’re not part of, submit bids, snipe (bid at the last moment), and otherwise track your auction-site experience. It includes MANY currencies (pound, dollar (US, Canada, Australian, and New Taiwanese) and euro, presently), drag-and-drop of auction URLs, an original, unique and powerful ‘multisniping’ feature, a relatively nice UI, and is known to work cleanly under Linux, Windows, Solaris, and MacOSX from the same binary.
Unlike other bid management software, it is EXTREMELY flexible in its formatting, which has let it survive with virtually no changes to the core web-page extraction code over the last seven years of eBay’s constant fluctuation of formatting. One more small change was necessary to support the eBay Stores items, since they don’t have any start dates, or number of bids. In general though, these were all very easy changes because of the structure of the program.
The Java code is also a reasonably good example of abstracted design and object oriented principles, pattern use, and has surprised even me with the amount of reusability and flexibility in it.
JBidWatcher uses a clean (custom Properties based) text format for its configuration files, has its own HTTP class, an HTML parser, and configuration class, all released under the LGPL. It also stores its save-files in XML, using a very customized fork of the NanoXML parser which is NOT LGPL’ed. That library uses the zlib/libpng license.
