July, 20, 2010 archives

i spend a lot of my day now dealing with a point-of-sale system that bothers me for the same reason that most software bothers me: it is broken and i can’t fix it. in this case, i can’t fix it because it is a closed-source application. one redeeming feature of the software is that it uses postgres as its back-end database, so it is relatively straightforward to get at the raw data and i’m not entirely hobbled by the slow, incomplete interfaces that the software itself offers. (instead i’m just hobbled by its baroque and undocumented schema and an inability to change or add to the data.)

so i have been poking around at the scant open source point-of-sale solutions, and they all generally look terrible, are complicated in directions that i don’t need complication, or are written in stupid languages like java.

php point of sale is way too simplistic, but it has helped me think about how i would (and likely will) build a point-of-sale system. unfortunately, i still haven’t figured out where to start.

so my hope is that if i start writing about it, i will find an entry point and i can eventually start building.