Journal #8481
Posted 10 years ago2014-12-11 01:39:12 UTC
So I've set myself a challenge:
From now until mid summer 2015, I'm going to create my own ePOS system.
What is ePOS? It's these piles of shit that every shop and their dog owns:
Working in a hotel last year, we were stuck with a shittly little till from the early 00's, maybe even 90's. Looking into the cost of how much one of these ePos systems would be, it's fucking ridiculous what they charge. The cheapest they provide for a glorified touchscreen? £500. I spent less money on my bloody beast of a computer.
I've been learning Java as part of my uni course, and being fairly OK with it, i thought i'd learn a bit of SQL and fuck about with that. From my very, very recent proper retail experience I noticed that their system runs on something called retailJ, a java based system that's in fairly wide use - so writing this in Java isn't a far out idea.
I've made similar POS systems on GMOD and made mockups of the UI and systems using Love2d - obviously as Love2D is a game engine and not something that should be run in an actual place of work it'd be useless.
I've got some idea of what I'm doing, and as well as working in retail I know exactly what sort of stuff needs to be kept in databases and retrieved.
My initial plan is to write up the code, get a very basic version working on my computer. Once that's all done, I'll double check whether my previous employer would be interested in the software ( because even if they don't want it, writing a POS system from scratch is pretty good practice ). If they are, I'll grab a raspberry PI, a shitty touchscreen off ebay, polish the thing up and trial it.
If all goes well, hopefully I can earn myself a bit of pocket money.
From now until mid summer 2015, I'm going to create my own ePOS system.
What is ePOS? It's these piles of shit that every shop and their dog owns:
I've been learning Java as part of my uni course, and being fairly OK with it, i thought i'd learn a bit of SQL and fuck about with that. From my very, very recent proper retail experience I noticed that their system runs on something called retailJ, a java based system that's in fairly wide use - so writing this in Java isn't a far out idea.
I've made similar POS systems on GMOD and made mockups of the UI and systems using Love2d - obviously as Love2D is a game engine and not something that should be run in an actual place of work it'd be useless.
I've got some idea of what I'm doing, and as well as working in retail I know exactly what sort of stuff needs to be kept in databases and retrieved.
My initial plan is to write up the code, get a very basic version working on my computer. Once that's all done, I'll double check whether my previous employer would be interested in the software ( because even if they don't want it, writing a POS system from scratch is pretty good practice ). If they are, I'll grab a raspberry PI, a shitty touchscreen off ebay, polish the thing up and trial it.
If all goes well, hopefully I can earn myself a bit of pocket money.
11 Comments
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Not sure about the regulations in your country, but where i live you need to have whats called a "fiscal board" that sits in between your printer and pc that records all the transactions. Interaction with card terminals is another thing. Discount cards and etc...
The idea itself is simple, but execution will take time.
Considering java is quite good when used in a correct sense ( and since this thing would only be running standalone with no connection to the internet, malware / security flaws would be a nonissue ).
I've started toying about with sql things ( currently trying sqlite, but the JCDB stuff works for JRE 1.7... and the current, security issue-free 1.8 is not supported. Fuck. )
What would you recommend other than Java?
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downloaded the older version of java, fingers crossed it won't create issues. NetBeans seems like a really nice ide, i'll see where I go from here. What's annoying is that at university they're really heavily teaching Java - in both informatics and in physics. The only other thing they've taught us is... haskell. And screw that.
Alternative options are a bit difficult - if you don't care about multi-platform support, C# + WPF might be a good option, but WPF is a very complex toolkit and I don't like it very much. HTML + JavaScript is a good choice, but it might not be compatible with the deployment mechanism of the software you want to make. As long as you avoid Swing, Java should be okay
SQLite is a good little library, I've used it before and it's good for small systems. It doesn't have a lot of data types, but it should be enough for what you need to do.
I am diving into all this info, maybe this is useful for whoever is interested in topic http://www.opensourceposguide.com/.