Alpine Lift Forecast

Update for 2012-2013 Season3

Whistler Blackcomb has discontinued the text-only lift-status page, which was the source of data for this project.  As a result, the lift forecast tool has been shut down.

What it Does

The Alpine Lift Forecast is a web application which displays historical data about the status of chair lifts at the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort for the past 7 days.  Upon re-opening, lifts that were previously closed  typically contain more fresh, untracked snow than the rest of the resort.   With the Alpine Lift Forecast tool, skiers and snowboarders no longer need to rely on word-of-mouth to obtain this valuable information.

How it Works

The ALF application retrieves a copy of the lift-status page from whistlerblackcomb.com, which it parses and saves into the Google App Engine Datastore.  Each time new data is retrieved, it is compared with the previous lift status, in which OPEN trumps STANDBY, which trumps CLOSED.

Technology

ALF is a Netbeans Java web application designed for the Google App Engine.  GAE hosts the application and database.  Web scraping is done by JSoup, and the datastore is accessed using Objectify.  This is the first web application I have written in Java and the first time using the Google App Engine.

How to Use

Visit the Alpine Lift Forecast at http://liftforecast.appspot.com

How to Build

See github for source code.