Apps How ambitious is this project?

[Nifty62]

Hey all,

I'm completely new to android development, I'm currently reading and watching guides and tutorials on the subject.

The project I want to create is for my work. I work in a store and every day we have to take inventory of our lottery tickets and compare our numbers with those of the computer and then adjust the numbers up or down depending on the results.

This is a fairly time consuming process by hand because I have to walk around with a clipboard and write down the numbers on the tickets, then calulate how many tickets there are remaining, then multiply them by their respective ticket values to get the value of the remaining tickets.

I have to do that for each lotto rack, and depending on the display instead of just looking at the number on the ticket, you have to take that number and subtract it from the total number of tickets in a stack.

Then you add up all these values and compare them to the days starting inventory value and this gives you the amount to account for. Then you print out a report which tells you what it should be.

From there you adjust up or down.

I want to create an android tablet app that you input the ticket values and other numbers into and it does all the math for me and simple displays the result.

It seems like this should be fairly simple, as programming goes. In PHP/JavaScript I believe I could write a similar script, I'm hoping that this is a realistic goal for me.

Any thoughts and advice would be appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[Rukbat]

Write it in PHP and Javascript. If it works (you'll have to install a web server on a computer or laptop and run it to see it working), you'll already have the program written, and you'll know how ambitious a project it was. Then learn Java and the android environment, mentally convert client/server to a single piece and "translate" your program.

I've converted many programs that were written to run locally into web apps exactly that way. PHP/Javascript to Java, and a different environment, isn't the ideal conversion job, but it's easier than learning to do the whole thing in Java from the start. Doing it in PHP/Javascript, you're going to be thinking of what it has to do, not how to use the language, which makes it a much less ambitious project. (Actually, other than the UI, it sounds kind of trivial in PHP/Javascript.)