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I have a POS software developed in PHP and running as a web application. I need to have dual monitors, one facing the employee with full details (sales screens showing heaps of options) and another monitor facing the customer with summarized information (ex. item, price list only)

How can that be achieved?

Many thanks

askanaan
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    who writes POS software in php ?!? –  Jul 17 '14 at 01:27
  • Why not? The advantage is that it runs as a Web application and can be accessed by store managers from mobile devices, hosted on the cloud, and no client installation required. – askanaan Jul 17 '14 at 01:32
  • I doubt you'll be able to do this without some nifty voodoo on the client side, php alone can't do what **you** want it to – ElefantPhace Jul 17 '14 at 01:33
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    I needed to solve exactly the same situation. In fact I had the same question as askanaan had. I have solved it with help of Websockets and Ratchet library. Unfortunately, I cannot answer this question here as it is locked, so I have written simple information guide and made really simple demo video for this question (if someone is still interested in this topic) http://www.phoca.cz/documents/38-tools/873-websockets-and-php - and yes, it is possible to write POS in PHP and of course there will be cons and pros when using PHP for writing POS. – Phoca Mar 03 '16 at 18:42

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Because your dealing with the web, event driven development is not going to be possible. So to get around this, you will need to have two browser instances (1 per monitor) where the waitress side will need to do an ajax push on each update and the customer end will need to do some kind of ajax polling based on a timer. There is a lot of information all over the internet about how to accomplish this sort of thing. Take a look at Push notification to the client browser for some more discussion on the topic. There are some less supported methods you maybe able to leverage like realtime push notifications or multipart/x-mixed-replace MIME type or Comet or HTML5 Websockets.

Community
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Alex Barker
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