The Story of this Website

When I first started going to The University of Texas at Dallas, I was forced to use the class search tools that they provided. These tools included Coursebook and the Galaxy system. I quickly found out that Coursebook could potentially be presenting the wrong information for up to 24 hours. Not only that, but I also quickly realized that Galaxy was a pain in the rear to login to and search with. I thought, why can't there be something simpler for a class search?

Version 1.0

My first solution to the problem was a simple notification service that ran every hour or so and alerted me to any changes that were made to ANY sections of specified courses. While this worked well for a bit, the constant emails become annoying, and I ended up stopping the program. Another problem with this iteration is that it required my computer to be on to run (It ran as a background process, so if I was heading to class, it wouldn't run). I decided to go back into the code and some necessary features.

Version 2.0

For Version 2.0, I thought it would be important to add in the ability to specify when I wanted to be alerted, and what changes did I want to be notified for. For example, I decided that I didn't like getting e-mails at 3 in the morning that someone was added to a waitlist, so in my preferences, I set it up to only allow notifications from 8 AM to Midnight for changes to the availability of a class (No more notification about increases in Waitlist size).

Version 3.0

The current iteration is what I like to call version 3.0. While Version 2.0 worked well for me, I didn't have the ability to help some of my friends who were looking for classes, so I decided to rewrite the program from scratch (In Java), adding in support for profiles, as well as a more robust profile management solution. And when that was done, I figured, "why stop there? Why not index all of Galaxy and offer a easy to use Search feature?" And a few months later, I had GalaxySearch up and running!

Note: Due to the potential time delay, the results displayed here may be different than what is displayed on Coursebook. Any discrepencies that do occur should not last very long (Either Coursebook will be updated, or GalaxySearch will fix the results on the next iteration)