What is it?
Start POS is my capstone project from college. It is the realization
of a long-time desire to design the perfect Point of Sale (POS) system for
a restaurant. This is meant to be an all-in-one content management system
as well as a POS. Including the menu and employee management.
This is a POSaaS, Point of Sale as a Service. POSs are typically sold
as a one time purchase and you often have to call for service if something
goes wrong. A restaurant owner will usually have to purchase a computer
from the POS provider. I plan for this to be usable on any device.
What is it made of?
The backend is a Node.js API implementing Express.js. The data is stored
on a MongoDB server. The front-end utilizes AngularJS. The front and back
ends are hosted independently on AWS. The API is tested with Mocha.
I am developing in the browswer first. It's simple to test the API
this way. Once the endpoints are fully tested the next step will be to
develop the iOS and Android apps.
Why isn't there much to it?
What you see so far was created in four months time (one semester).
Most of that time was spent learning the frameworks, which was the goal
of the project, to learn. It did earn me an A for the course.
Initially the front and back ends were together in Express.js using
Handlebars for the front end. Once I started to get into AngularJS I
realized I needed to bifurcate the two into separate entities. This required
starting over from line 1.
What makes it different?
Start POS completely encompassses all the needs of a restaurant, including
employee scheduling, time-clock tracking, and management-employee communication.
I know what works in restaurants. More importantly, I know the pain points.
Every server complains about the POS of their store. There are some great
ones out there. There are also some really bad ones. But they all have
something that they are good at.
What's next?
Over the next few months the app will be fully-fleshed out. The goal is to get it into a restaurant within a year. In that time I will have to learn Android and iOS development.