Joe’s Chocolate Box

A Multimedia Ordering System for Restaurant

Hu He, Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, Ireland,  December 2005

Abstract:

This thesis is about a project which is developed as a multimedia ordering system for restaurant. The project includes two parts: Website Ordering System and In-restaurant Ordering System. In the Website Ordering System, customers can check the dishes, make their orders, and pay their orders through a website which has rich information (pictures, text etc) about dishes. In restaurants, PDA can be used to present the multimedia information of dishes to customers, as well as deal with the orders which can be transferred to kitchen and be recorded into database through the mobile devices and server. Also, this system provides a PC client which also can deal with orders and present the multimedia information to staff for training purpose.

Technology involved:

1:  JVM on PocketPC
I use the PDA with Pocket PC system as the wireless mobile device for the ordering system, There are many JVMs which can run on the Pocket PC. Such as IBM’s J9 JVM [1] or NSICOM’s CrEme JVM [2]. There are several other JVMs on the market, but they all suffer from these problems: not supported anymore (Sun’s PersonalJava), not fully Java compatible (SuperWaba), not fully Java compatible (EWE), on sale to OEMs only (Esmertec JBed, formerly Insignia Jeode), or out of date (Insignia Jeode). Because the price for IBM’s J9 JVM is very good at $5.99/each., so I choose the J9 JVM at first.

2:  JVM and JDK on PC
J2SE 1.5.0 is used in PC client of my project. The external version number of J2SE 1.5.0 is 5.0, ”1.5.0” is an internal version number, which is according to Sun’s new statement of naming and versioning conventions. It is easy to confuse people sometimes, so I call the new version
as J2SE 5.0 consistently in this article.

3:  The choice of server-client mechanism
In this project, PDA client and server is a Java RMI(Remote Method Invocation) system. Java RMI is a mechanism that allows one to invoke a method on an object that exists in another address space. The RMI mechanism is basically an object-oriented RPC(Remote Procedure Call) mechanism.

4:  The choice of wireless solution
There are two wireless protocols which can facilitate PDA communicating with PC server. They are WLAN 802.11 and Bluetooth. The data transfer rate of 802.11 is faster than Bluetooth.

5:  The choice of MySQL Database
There are many SQL database which can work with JAVA, like: Oracle, ODBC ,MySQL etc. but Oracle is commercial software, which costs a lot of money. MySQL is an open source database, which is free and has many features. MySQL is suitable for developing such a small business environment project.

The system structure of this project:

The Multimedia Ordering System structure is shown in the Figure 1.1. This system is mainly made up from two parts:
1. WebSite Ordering System.
2. In-restaurant Ordering System.

The whole thesis can be download at the following link: My Thesis.

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