Careers360 scrapper

What it does

Crawls Careers360 for Indian college listings — names, locations, courses, fee structures — and persists them into a local MySQL database for further analysis. REST APIs expose the scraped data.

Why I built it

This is one of my earliest Spring Boot projects. I wanted to learn the framework properly — JPA entities, repositories, service layers, REST controllers — and scraping a data source with real-world messiness was more interesting than building a TODO app.

Stack & decisions

Spring Boot + JPA. The whole point was to learn these. I modeled colleges and courses as entities with relationships, wrote queries through the repository layer, and exposed read endpoints through controllers.

Jsoup. Standard choice for HTML parsing in the JVM world. Selector syntax that looks like CSS, forgiving about malformed markup.

MySQL. Local database, no cloud involved. For a learning project, simplicity wins.

What I learned

This project is archived now — it’s a snapshot of where I was a few years ago, not something I’d ship today. Looking back, the things I’d do differently are the usual “early Spring Boot” lessons: less logic in controllers, more defensive handling of the source site’s HTML changes, and rate-limiting that respects the source.

I keep it up because it’s an honest record of how I learned Spring, and because the next time I need to scrape something, starting from a working project is faster than starting from a tutorial.