Restaurant order system

This post is outdated and only exists for historical reasons

Recently whilst having lunch with a friend at a restaurant, the discussion came up of why you can't create separate orders when you make your decisions on the meals you will be having. The ability to split your order into portions on the table so that you are able to keep track of your own meal and not have to factor in the cost of the other people at the table to your own subtotal until you finally go to the cashier to pay.

This sparked an idea inside my head to create my own order management system which ran off of MySQL and Android devices. The main idea being that the waiter would have a easy to navigate database of all the items of which are on the patrons menu's. Later on a friend of mine (who has worked in waiting) told me that the reason why this doesn't happen is due purely to lack of time, as in it takes to long to organize several meals to a single table. This time constraint issue then led to another idea... Why not have an application which guests can install (or run on their mobile browsers) which allowed them to look through an electronic menu and then create an order for themselves.. As in the customer get's what they want fully organised from their device, then when the waiter comes around they just site their reference number and their order is added to the table under either the whole tables bill or a partial bill of which is separate from the main (as in, person A has their bill and so does person B).

I soon realized after this that this adds tons of other possibilities, so I started out on creating a MySQL based android application for restaurants. In my first build I have a working Windows server 2012 running MySQL/PHP/Apache and an application which can connect to the database, look at available data and create new entries!!

Make sure to follow my facebook/twitter (above) to keep up to date on my progress in creating this system and I hope to keep everyone posted!!