A Web-Based Lunch Ordering System

Is the on-line system better than write-order-on-scrap-paper method? Debatable, but it certainly is more fun (at least for me).

Improvements? The web page is geared towards an individual making an order, as opposed to a person ordering for multiple people. In hindsight, the web page could have been laid out with the latter in mind, and, being a superset of the former, would satisfy those requirements as well. A simple compromise could be having a multiples box, which would allow a person to order more than one serving of the same dish per order row. In the current scheme, this would still only allow four different orders per e-mail. So make it 10? 20? How long is a piece of rope? (paraphrased to make it more sinister). A design problem left to the reader.

I suppose I could also hook it into an SQL database (http://www.mysql.org/) and print out a histogram of the past orders for a particular person. A by-product of using a database is that one could print out reports, e.g., what is to be ordered for that week.

I suppose if there is enough interest and if I have enough time, I'll add a second part to this system, where the CGI script would interact with a SQL database and return HTML code to display a frequency list. And, perhaps, with some cookie interaction.

Finally, on a personal note, I've seen the future and it is Python. Look it up (and JPython too!).

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