POS Point Of Sale

[Manol]

Hello.

   1.- Has anybody try to develop a point of sale with processwire?

   2.- I'm thinking about to start a simple POS with a responsive template so the client would be able to work from a Pda or smartphone as well as a desktop.

   3.- Do you think a machine with linux/apache/processwire would fit for a commerce with thousands of products or should a rather use a different programming language?

Thank you to everybody in advance.

[Alessio Dal Bianco]

Hello.

   1.- Has anybody try to develop a point of sale with processwire?

   2.- I'm thinking about to start a simple POS with a responsive template so the client would be able to work from a Pda or smartphone as well as a desktop.

   3.- Do you think a machine with linux/apache/processwire would fit for a commerce with thousands of products or should a rather use a different programming language?

Thank you to everybody in advance.

I think that Processwire can fit nearly everything . But how many shops must manage the web-app ? I think that the problem is to manage the usage and the syncronization with the server when the shop is temporary offline...

USSliberty

[bfncs]

I imagine what you want could be archieved nicely by some kind of offline-capable Javascript MVC app built with something like Angular.js, Ember.js, Backbone.js or similiar frameworks. This way you can make it feel very quick and at least do some meaningfull stuff, when the server is offline. You could still use Processwire for managing the data and quickly build a JSON API to communicate with.

[Pete]

I'd forgotten about Angular et al - thanks for the reminder.

Basically, +1 to what boundaryfunctions said Javascript will get you an extremely fast interface for any web-capable device.

Just remember though there are considerations like barcode scanners to think about. Though a USB barcode scanner essentially just a keyboard that types the code and presses enter (I've tried it, that's all it does once it's converted it to numbers ) I'm not sure whether it would be the same on a hand-held barcode scanner that runs your web app - it might not be that easy to talk to the scanner. Certainly for a smartphone you wouldn't be able to talk to a third-party barcode scanner app easily, but theoretically it could work on a "proper" handheld device for shops.

[bfncs]

...and Pete, you're right about the hardware aspect, didn't think about that. So, either you could get your hardware to do something web-compatible (like emulating keyboard inputs) or you might go bleeding edge and use something like a chrome packaged app that supports serial, usb, etc. If this doesn't suffice, you might install an instance of node.js on your local pos machine to read your hardware (I remember this was quite easy to do on a linux system) and connect it to your app with web sockets.

None of this ways will enable you to use custom hardware on mobile devices, though, so probably the route to go there would be a native app (which could still communicate with a backend built with Processwire).

Please keep us posted about which way you go, sounds quite interesting.