Category: Coding Adventures

Optimizing Merchandise Ordering, Tracking, and Sales with Barcode and QR Code Scanning

In today’s fast-paced retail and supply chain environments, efficiency is king. The ability to order, track, and sell merchandise without delay or error isn’t just an advantage anymore—it’s a necessity. One of the unsung heroes of this operation? The humble barcode scanner. Whether scanning traditional barcodes or QR codes, this technology has evolved into a critical tool for optimizing the entire flow of goods. From ensuring accurate stock levels to streamlining point-of-sale (POS) systems, barcode scanning is a quiet powerhouse driving modern retail and inventory management.

Here’s how barcode and QR code scanning are revolutionizing merchandise handling—and how you can integrate it into your web-based application with a Scandit demo.

Streamlined Inventory Management

Let’s start at the warehouse or backroom. Efficient ordering hinges on having a clear, real-time understanding of what’s available in stock. Each time merchandise arrives, barcode scanning at intake ensures that the product is logged accurately into the inventory system. This eliminates manual data entry errors and ensures that the stock count is current. Need to know how many units of that best-selling product you have on hand? Just a quick scan, and it’s logged into the system with perfect accuracy.

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Starting a New Project – Let’s Choose a Tech Stack!

It’s time to start a new project. Because one can never have enough side projects! /s

This particular project I’ll be writing about in this post is derived from the multi-tenant music collector’s database I’ve already started working on. I’ve finally gotten back to it, during a slight break in collecting and music listening, to write up some of my thinking about this particular project.

Stated Objectives For This Application

  1. Personal Reasons: I always like to have side projects that I could make use of myself. Since I’ve recently started collecting music again, and in that am a new collector of vinyl albums, I wanted a better way to organize all that music and the extensive history, members, song, lyrics, and related information about the music and artists.
  2. For Everybody: Beyond the desire to have a well built application to provide the capabilities I’ve described above, I also want to provide this capability to others. In light of that capability, I’ll be designing this application as a multi-tenant application so that you too dear reader, once I get it built can use the application for your own music collection.
  3. Choose The Tech Stack: I’ll need to write this application in something, obviously, so this post is going to cover my reasoning for the tech stack I’m going to use. The application will be built in three core pieces: the database, the services and middle tier layer, and the user interface. I’ll detail each and cover the reasoning for the stack I’ll choose for each section.
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An Approach to Learning Java Fast for New & Experienced Polyglot Coders

If you’re just starting out learning Java, here are the top 5 things you can do to get started effectively:

  1. Set Up Your Development Environment:
    • Install the Java Development Kit (JDK) on your computer. You can download it from the official Oracle website or use an open-source distribution like OpenJDK. It can be confusing at first, because there are a bunch of versions you *could* get started with depending on a million different variables, just pick the latest though and get going.
    • Choose a code editor or Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, or Visual Studio Code to write and run your Java code. IDEs offer features like code completion and debugging, which can be very helpful for beginners.
  2. Learn the Basics of Java:
    • Start with the fundamental concepts of Java, such as variables, data types, operators, and control structures (if statements, loops).
    • Understand the object-oriented programming (OOP) principles that Java is based on, including classes, objects, inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Even if you do not use any of these and you’re taking a different approach (functional, top-down, etc) it’s really important to at least learn and understand the OOP concepts and capabilities of Java, as at some point you will see these and to understand what is going on, you’ll need to understand this part of Java.
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Java Time with Introspective GraphQL on Chaos Database AKA Pre- Refactor Prototype Mutating Database Spring Boot Java Hack App

With the previous work to get a testing environment built and running done (in Python), I was ready to get started on the GraphQL API as previously described. As a refresher, this description,

singular mission to build a GraphQL API against a Mongo database where the idea is, one could query the underlying collections, documents, and fields with the assumption that users would be adding or possibly removing said collections, documents, and fields as they needed.

My intent is to build with with a Java + Spring stack. Just like with the Python app in the previous post, the first thing I like to do is just get the baseline GraphQL API “Hello World” app up and running.

At the end of this post I’ll include/link the Github repository.

Phase 1: Getting the Initial GraphQL API Compiling & Running with a “Hello World”.

Prerequisites & Setup

  • The post previous to this “Fruit and Snakes: Frequent Mutative Mongo User Database with Python” I created the Mongo Database and setup the app that would create, every few seconds, new collections, documents, and other collateral to put into a Mongo database for the sole purpose of creating this GraphQL API.
  • I’ll be using Java 17 for this work, so to ensure the least risk of versioning issues, get Java 17. The same goes for Spring 3. I’ve shown my selections from the Spring Initializr (not using Intellij? Cool, get a start with the Spring Initializr Site) in the screenshots that follow.
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Fruit and Snakes: Frequent Mutative Mongo User Database with Python

The end results of this code base are used in another post I made, titled “Java Time with Introspective GraphQL on Chaos Database AKA Pre- Refactor Prototype Mutating Database Spring Boot Java Hack App“.

Recently I had a singular mission to build a GraphQL API against a Mongo database where the idea is, one could query the underlying collections, documents, and fields with the assumption that users would be adding or possibly removing said collections, documents, and fields as they needed.

That sounds somewhat straight forward enough, but before even getting started with the GraphQL API I really needed some type of environment that would mimic this process. That is what this article is about, creating a test bed for this criteria.

The Mongo Database & Environment

First thing I did was setup a new Python environment using virtualenv. I wrote about that a bit in the past if you want to dig into that deeper, the post is available here.

virtualenv fruit_schema_watcher

Next up I created a git repo with git init then added a README.md, LICENSE (MIT), and .gitignore file. The next obvious thing was the need for a Mongo database! I went to cracking on a docker-compose file, which formed up to look like this.

version: '3.1'  
  
services:  
  mongo:  
    image: mongo:latest  
    container_name: mongodb_container  
    ports:  
      - "27017:27017"  
    environment:  
      MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME: root  
      MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD: examplepass  
    volumes:  
      - mongo-data:/data/db  
  
volumes:  
  mongo-data:

With that server running, I went ahead and created a database called test manually. I’d just do all the work from here on out with that particular database.

Continue reading “Fruit and Snakes: Frequent Mutative Mongo User Database with Python” →