JBidwatcher: eBay auction sniping software
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JBidwatcher: eBay sniping, bidding & monitoring software.

Latest News Flash (8-Aug-2009 10:35pm PDT)

8-Aug-2009 10:35pm PDT —
I'm making JBidwatcher 2.1pre4 more widely available, since 2.0.1 is having so many problems. 2.1pre4 is a pre-release of the next major version (2.1), which should fix a large number of eBay issues which cropped up after their most recent spate of changes.
23-Feb-2009 1:15am PST —
A bugfix release, JBidwatcher 2.0.1, is now available. Several issues came up when 2.0 got a larger audience, and this version fixes the majority of them. No more phantom auctions, hanging on startup with large databases, or freezes on 'Test Login'. More below.
14-Feb-2009 8:10pm PST —
JBidwatcher 2.0 has been released! No longer the realm of alpha, beta, pre-release, etc., but fully 2.0. While I'm sure there's more work to do, and issues yet unresolved, it's reached a very solid point. Click down to the news to read some of the things fixed in this version.

JBidwatcher Project Purpose

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 adult-auction management, 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.

Please do not re-sell the JBidwatcher program or code.

JBidwatcher is under active development, and issues are reasonably quickly responded to. Bug reports and feature requests are always welcome, as are praise and complaints. Always feel free to make suggestions or report bugs.

If you'd like to know a bit about some of the advanced configuration settings that are not yet available from the configuration UI, you can look at my guide to the configuration file format. It is slightly out of date, as recent releases have added a wealth of tuning configuration parameters. A less descriptive listing of the existing configuration values is on the JBidwatcher development forum.

News Flash (February 23, 2009) — JBidwatcher 2.0.1 is available!

Fixes include (in the order they got fixed):
  • If the toolbar is hidden on startup, on platforms that support it, show the login status in the menu bar.
  • Eliminate 'phantom' auctions, where it claims it's in the list, but you can't find it
  • Some listings which got completely 'lost', are now found
  • When debugging is enabled at startup, substantially deeper database debug logging is kept
  • Snipes status should now be accurately visible in the UI
  • If you change passwords or usernames, snipes can now be successfully cancelled and set during that same session
  • Fix the freeze-on-startup with maxxed CPU problem; mainly happened with very large auction databases
  • Recognize infinite redirects during 'test login' as most likely being captcha interference
  • Add a 'License Details' Help menu entry, so folks know what the license for JBidwatcher is
  • Finally fix the icon paths in the 'Colors and Icons' Help page
  • Add a 'just to be sure' update at 30 seconds after the end of a sniped auction
JBidwatcher 2.x requires at least Java 1.5. This is available for Windows and Linux across the board, but it means that OS X 10.4 or later will be required for the Mac. I feel comfortable with two major versions back (So OS X 10.4 and 10.5, Java 1.5 and 1.6), as it combines the maximum number of people who will be able to use it, and a relatively usable development environment.

Older News (February 14, 2009) —
JBidwatcher 2.0 is released!

Fixes include (in no particular order):
  • Bidding on items that are only visible on the non-US eBay sites should be more consistent (the error manifested as getting an error page which appears to be another login page)
  • Snipes placed or cancelled through the web interface show up in the main UI
  • Finally resolving a nagging problem with display configurations not being saved between sessions
  • Multisnipes not firing, or seeing 'unsafe multisnipes' when there aren't
  • Duplicate entries in the display should finally be eliminated
  • Auctions that end, or whose bid amount changes, should also consistently reflect the latest state that JBidwatcher knows
  • The .dmg for Mac users should have a link to the Applications folder, for easy drag-and-drop installation
  • Large deletes should be possible again (the delete happens in the background)
  • Better handling of eBay's bad HTML
  • Multiple currencies are allowed in multisnipes (although it's a bad practice, and you're warned against it!)
  • Double-click in the open space (where listings aren't) will clear the selection
  • --usb on the command line should work better now
  • eBay's habit of sending 404's for perfectly valid auctions has been partially worked around
  • Only active listings are loaded during start up, everything else (completed listings) gets loaded later, in the background
  • The Mature Audiences checkbox is now clearer about its use (and should not be used by non-US users; it will break logging into eBay)
  • The default browser on Linux is now 'firefox'
  • Under Mac OS X the JBidWatch.cfg file should be stored with the rest of JBidwatcher's files now

Older News (January 16, 2009) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 11 has been made available!

This is a critical release for anyone using multisniping; sometimes JBidwatcher will fail to associate multisnipes correctly on restart. When that happens and one auction is won in the multisnipe group, it fails to cancel the other items. That means that it may continue to bid on later items in a multisnipe group, even though it's won an earlier item. This is a really serious bug, one of the worst that JBidwatcher can have, and I feel sick at what it could do to folks. Please upgrade.

This version contains only a fix for that problem, and a minor fix for a problem writing to the database. Other bugs and issues will be handled in future releases, but this bug is a very high priority to get fixed.

Older News (January 11, 2009) -- JBidwatcher 2.0 beta 10 is available!

This release should handle the Fixed Price problems, as well as other issues relating to eBay's new pages. It should read My eBay Watching pages, as well. It should include a favicon for when you're viewing pages in the internal web server, fix snipe failures when there's an error doing the pre-snipe, the XML file should contain the 'winning' status again, dutch auction recognition is improved, and data storage should be more consistent. It should also resolve the international issues (ticket #508).
Technical Attributes

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.

I'm also using a customized variant of the BrowserLauncher Java class, customized to use JRE1.4's Windows Registry access functions (if available!) to discover the default browser on Windows. It's also customized so that the user can override its 'decision' for the Unix platform, and Windows if the registry functions aren't available. It uses Reflection so that it works without issues on any supported JRE (1.2.2 and later).

Written by: Morgan Schweers
Last modified: Sat Jun 20 04:17:15 PDT 2009