mShop - an introduction

Today I would like to start a little series of articles about a personal software project called mShop. The mShop application is a response to a discussion I had with some friends a while ago about the handling of internal orders for office supplies and other items you need to carry out your daily work, eg. printer paper, pencils, desktop computers, user accounts or permissions. The key question was if there are any professional tools to comply with the following requirements:

• define products having arbirary attributes during runtime


• flexible delegation of responsibilites concerning the approval of product orders


• automatic delegation of approved order items into sub-systems for further processing, eg. unix server for user account creation.


• being cheap within boundaries

We came to the conclusion that there are indeed sophisticated tools like ActiveEntry or one might use an existing open source shopping platform and modify it according to his needs. BUT, the solutions are either expensive, limited in their feature set or require the owner to use their inflexible data structures.

That finally let to my decision to specify and implement an application that is compatible with the features mentioned above. According to my nick mnxfst I took the first char (m) of it and added the postfix shop.

To keep the articles short, I split them up into a series where each entry concentrates on a different key feature of mShop. The next article will discuss the definition of objects users might order via the web shop.