Newbie Questions

[booeyOH]

Hello,
I have a web application that is an economic literacy program for kids, and one of the things we have is a fake point of sale portion.

I would very much like to incorporate a receipt printer and cash drawer to work INSIDE of my PHP/MySQL web application without a ton of hassle. Is this possible, can I just have someone write a Java or ActiveX program to interface with the printer and/or cash drawer, or is it a whole lot more complicated than that.

Thanks,
Bryan

 

[TLowder]

I use star printers in my application and they have examples at

http://www.starmicronics.com/printers/printers_pages/support/programming.html

There are different printing styles such as OPOS, windows driver or StarComm, all of which are easy to program. You can connect the cash drawer directly to the printer, which is probably what you will want to do since the computers your connecting to may not have serial ports. As far as interfacing with a web application, I've never done this, but with an active x and using the StarComm or Windows driver print style you should be ok. I'd probably stay away from the OPOS printing since this will be a web application.

Tom