Subsystems

Some initial thoughts here. I think the kiosk web server should run on another port than the main web server. This will make it easy to set up firewall rules prohibiting access from anyone but localhost. Django would not ease the creation of the kiosk GUI very much, since it will mostly be a lot of Javascript and no advanced interaction with the database.

Django would run inside Apache. We don’t have to think about scaling and serving static files from nginx or anything, this is easy to configure later if there is a need, but it is unlikely that it will be a high-traffic web site anyway.

I have not put much thought into this, but I think we should have a separate RFID-handling daemon (likely written in C) with a database connection. When rows are added to some table by this process, we can use the trigger mechanisms of the database server to handle the request in some other process after this daemon has done its thing (e.g., the kiosk should show whether or not orders are valid).