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…)

Target setting

The main target is creating the system to provide service for working with video podcasts (a collection of video files which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers) recorded by users and uploaded to the server. The access to the video should be provided on user’s request or via user’s connection to the broadcasting channel in real time. A number of users (privileged ones) should have the ability to create the podcasts (i.e. to upload digitized video of standard formats (AVI, MPEG2) recorded by personal video camera). All the users should have the ability to review the podcasts via web-browsers as a part of web-page.
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Lately, I’ve been working on a geographically distributed clustered web system and got several ideas I would like to share. All of them are written by blood, sweat and pieces of lost dollars.

Don’t rely on stability
“Yes, this is obvious” - you may say. But I was knowing this from start the project also. However during deployment and preproduction testing the life has shown many new tricks to me. Building network system all conscious developers will introduce some retries/recovery routines. However, absence of components stability has many implicit consequences.

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