Re: [seul-edu] Cafeteria management software

[Jacques Fortier <jfortier@seul.org>]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Doug Loss wrote:

> Now that our various philosophical discussions have quieted down, I
> have a few messages about concrete items that I want to bring up.
> 
> What ever happened with the cafeteria management software idea?  If
> it's just quietly disappeared, I think it's time to bring it up
> again.  This looks to me like something that's both fairly easy to
> do and likely to be very useful.  SEUL will be happy to provide our
> standard hosting resources to such a project
> <http://www.seul.org/pub/hosting.html>.  If the people who talked
> about it (Ryan, Jaques, others?) are willing to have a go at it, I
> think we can come up with something usable in short order.  Let's
> hear some committments of effort!  Bruno, does EduML have fields
> that would cover use in such software?
	Essentially, what happened was that I contacted Ryan privately to
discuss his requirements.  I was going to forward some of that to the
list, but forgot to do so.  I see that Ryan has now done so.  I meant to
respond to earlier messages about this, but for various reasons I haven't
had very much time with my e-mail lately.
	Some people have suggested alternatives to the web-based
interface.  I think there may also have been talk of a grand
cafeteria-management program to end all cafeteria-management programs.  It
isn't my intention to be disparaging towards anyone who'd be interested in
implementing such a thing, but I felt that the particular circumstances
here called for a more customized, less generic solution.  If you've read
through Ryan's specs I think you'll agree that what they're looking for is
fairly specialized, and couldn't be made to work in a generic cafeteria
program without some major tradeoffs.  As well, it's my impression (and I
could be totally off-base here) that not too many resources are being
provided by the school for this project.  Because of this, I think that
the PHP/MySQL solution is the best, as it will allow a custom system to be
developed fairly quickly.  If they decide that the web interface just
isn't good enough, at least the database will already be in place, and
they'll have something until a better client is developed.

Regards,

Jacques