POS APP

Inspiration

We wanted to build a SaaS app for private companies (as opposed to regular users). We first thought of a password-management app, but we finally settled on a POS (point-of-sale) app. A POS app has the potential for implementing many interfaces and roles (employee and manager), along with heavy data manipulation and graphing, such as inventory, monthly reports generation, graphs for sales, earnings, and much more.

What it does

The app currently consists of a Next JS frontend (backend to be added), with a "selection" display. The selection display shows the current employee logged in, the categories for items, a search bar for items, the items, and the shopping cart. As you click on an item, the item is added to the shopping cart; the quantity of items in the shopping cart can be increased/decreased or the item can be removed. The app counts with login/sign up pages, and an admin form for creating new items. The second major page will be the checkout page, which needs to be designed with code, but it is already designed on a sketch.

How we built it

We decided to use Next JS as opposed to "create-react-app" since the former one provides built in search-engine-optimzation (SEO) and social-media-optimization (SMO). Also, Next JS has great flexibility in choosing among client-side rendering, server-side rendering, and hybrid rendering. Moreover, Next JS allows you to hydrate the pages, not needing to wait for the data from external API's to be fully available for rendering the pages.

So far the greatest accomplishments are the docker file, written for production level, and the app's shopping cart. The app shopping cart is beautifully designed with a JavaScript map, which is converted into an array at time of rendering on the page. The cart is contained in a React Context hook, which allows the cart to be transported anywhere on the app. Amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!

Challenges we ran into

Deploying the app to the cloud is the greatest challenge so far. We ran into a major road block with the harness community platform (described at the end o this section). Once the app is on the cloud, it will be a beautiful app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for POS APP

BIG NOTE TO THE HARNESS TEAM:

Hi, I'm Luis, and I'm in charge of devops in the project. While following Harness CD' quickstart tutorial for deploying using harness, when I got to the step of running the kubernetes commands, my machine's kubernetes stopped working. I had to reset my computer, and then kubernetes started successfully. Since I could not finish all the steps in the tutorial, when trying to edit the project in harness, it did not allow to finish the configuration steps. Had to delete the project, but then the platform does not allow to create another project, unless you subscribe to enterprise plan by contacting sales. I would appreciate your guidance on how I can create another project. Also, the platform does not allow me to create another account either. I'm basically locked up (i think this is something that should be addressed by the Harness team).

My email: lmmartinez3312@live.com

Update, Feb. 10: Was able to resolve above issue; now trying to deploy app to production using Harness and Microsoft Azure.