Iziit

sources

article published on 28^th October 2019 (last modification on 1^st August 2022)

Iziit is an open-source browser extension that filters food on online shopping websites according to their allergens. Unfortunately, the extension is no longer available for download since January 2022. It has not met with the expected success and is too expensive to maintain.

User Interface

The extension's UI is a simple popup window that allows you to choose the products to filter from a list of allergens. The last page of the popup is used to manage different profiles.

Once the dietary preferences have been entered, the articles on the site are displayed with a green, red or gray background.

• green: The article respects the dietary preferences.
• red: The article doesn't respect the dietary preferences.
• grey: The server is analyzing the product or has not successfully found it's composition.

Server

The server is split into many modules:

iziit-server

This is the module that is at the top of the hierarchy. It takes care of the extension download website by mainly delivering static resources. As for requests coming from the extension, it simply forwards them to the "iziit-addon-backend" module.

iziit-addon-backend

This module checks the validity of queries and constructs an appropriate response based on user preferences and article composition. To know the composition of an article, it requests it from the "iziit-database-manipulator" module.

iziit-database-manipulator

Undoubtedly the biggest module of all, it takes care of handling a MongoDB database containing the composition of the articles.

When a composition is requested, it is either known and the answer is immediate, or it is unknown, in which case it must be found. To do this, the module downloads the article page, thus retrieving the list of ingredients. This list is then parsed using the "iziit-supervised-ingredients" module.

The module also takes care of regularly updating the database to deal with compositions that have evolved. Finally, items that have been in the database for a long time and are no longer needed are deleted to make space.

iziit-supervised-ingredients

Very light module consisting mainly of regular expressions allowing the parsing of ingredient lists.