Awesome.

These are excellent infos for anyone thinking about the same thing.

Thank you for the sample php script too. I still have yet to dabble in that. A bit of Perl for cgi is what I'm using now. Yeah, I'm a n00b at httpd. Gotta get with the times

A quick Google turned up this tutorial: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/mysql/
There is also a tutorial on the mysql web site.
I can recommend you understand what a database does first and then do the administration in any (web) interface that you like.
For interfacing your C program you need to compile in the MySQL libraries into you program. I did that once a few years ago. I don' t recall enough to tell something useful, but Google is your friend. It was easier than I expected, but I had some previous experience with MySQL. Hence my recommendation to familiarize yourself with MySQL first.

jlinkels

have you ever checked to use something like https://unicenta.com for example
or any other existing, free solution

I understand that it makes more fun to hack an own solution, but it could also be a good idea to check and hack existing solutions

2 members found this post helpful.

I completely agree.

I've downloaded quite a number of things that are similar. I think I checked out Unicenta. Floreant. LemonPOS. A bunch I can't remember. GnuCash is worth looking at. There's this neat gtk thing called EasyPOS that runs in it own directory. The directory is the database. It's kinda clever. Segfaults a lot and the interface needs work, but the idea is cool, for a single terminal cafe or something.

Suse has a whole branch for POS. They look like they might know what they're doing too.

I could never get any of the decent big ones to compile. They're so huge it's like compiling a Web Browser or Office Suite or something. They're so huge I don't even know where to start.

So I decided to try to wrap my head around dbms. That should amuse me for a while.

I'd like the entire interface controlled by a db. I guess it would be like ODF or something, a renamed zipfile with a directory structure and a bunch of xml files and stuff. Can be password encrypted too, like PDF.

The configurability is key because businesses differ so wildly.

I guess the actually app would be a file reader/writer/editor and displayer. What it displays is what's in the file. Standard modules: users, accounts, suppliers, clients, parts, products, food, services, and of course a vast array of specialized hardware modules for whatever is required.

And yeah, it's mostly about learning new things. Beats heck out of TV.