The article sets out a few key moments, which should be considered when developing software for terminals. Under a terminal in this document should be understood payment kiosks, self-service kiosks, internet access kiosks.

The User Interface

The system users mostly are not very much advanced in contemporary technologies. For over a number of years terminals have been equipped with touch screens. Owing to such screens, people feel at ease and can promptly select necessary items via the screen menu. In other words when developing a system we shall select a touch screen as the input and data display device. For simple systems, a 15-inch screen is quite enough. For a system with a more complex and advanced interface – 17-inch displays would be a better choice.

Which Technology to Choose for UI

There are several options. The most common are Flash and HTML in a browser (browser in the full-screen mode or IE Active X). Flash + Celeron 1.7 GHz are enough for a payment terminal. However, for dynamic games like “one-handed bandit” such technologies are no good. (more…)

Authors: Renat Akhmerov, Sergey Dryganets, Alexey Kharlamov

Since the public introduction in August of 2006 the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has gained significant momentum among web developer. The technology allows to build very interactive and responsive applications using convenient and very sophisticated tools as Eclipse, Maven and SVN. Moreover the GWT aims to build cross-browser applications by isolating platform specific quirks.

Our team has used Google Web Toolkit since the 1.1 release. While we are very happy with overall development experience we have found several performance limitations of the library. Actually, the limitations originate from restrictions inherited from the HTML layout algorithms and browsers implementations. In this article we will try to offer ways to workaround these limits by using more effective ways of HTML manipulations.

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