Lukeman
Lukeman™ is a order and billing system designed for hotels and restaurants. It's strenght relies on its open architecture and scalability.
The reason I started developing such a thing was that existing systems (like Orderman) were just too heavy for the purposes i needed it: billing for hotel guests.
The strenghts of Lukeman are there due to some features and design issues:
- Complete hardware independence: Lukeman is written completely in PHP and is built on Apache+PHP+MySQL. Only a small part, which communicates with the printers and the hotel software, is written in managed C# code
- Complete hardware independence #2 : Lukeman can, due to its design, be run from any device which supports the diplay of HTML pages with Javascript. That means, that you can run it on a PDA, a laptop, a set-top box, a cellular phone etc.
- Scalabilty: There is virtually no limit of users, guests, tables, articles and so on. Additionally, using MySQL as backend, the system remains speedy even with a huge workload. It is also multiscalar, allowing it to be run from more computers at the same time
- Flexibility: Pretty every aspect of Lukeman can be changed to suit your needs. Even a Plugin system is available (using that you can, for example, control the music playback from every terminal)
- Security: Multiple checks on all transactions and a user privilege system avoid security troubles
- Fast: Using PHP and MySQL rends possible a speedy execution (about 0.05 sec / transaction) even on slow computers
- Affordable: The costs are limited to the hardware you need: A PC running the server, a PDA or some other type of terminal, and a network (wireless or cabled).
Here you can see some screenshots of version 0.1 (Date: 29 jan 2004)
