Cafeteria Management System as a project. What should I use?

This is a part of my course project.

Basically, there are vendors which provide food and at peak hours the queue gets so large that people have to wait long for their order.

Our project is like an online site which will enable users to order food. After ordering the food, the user will get an info as to where does he lie in the queue. This way students can order from their hostel rooms without actually going to the vendor and getting their time wasted by waiting in the line. As soon as the user orders the food, vendor gets notified of the project so that he can start preparing the food.

I am completely new to web development so I am not sure wha开发者_运维问答t to use. This project will also work as an exercise to learn about web development.

I have heard about Drupal & Joomla CMS. Also, Django framework is also there and I am actually confused as to what technology to use.

I am also confused as to what is the difference between a framework and a CMS? How do they differ and which one will suit me.

So, how do I go about developing the application?

A framework is a basic application without any concrete business logic. It contains basic structure and sometimes basic features (like database connectivity and other standard libraries). You have to write your code yourself. A CMS is a content management system. It is essentially a complete website but without the content. it provides tools to write content (web pages). The most popular ones (like Joomla) come with a bunch of templates too that you can download to give your site any look you want.

A CMS probably doesn't have enough features to provide you with this logic. You will probably need to do some programming to get this done. It may still be useful to use a CMS, though. Lots of them support various plugins that allow you to add these kind of features and still allow you to easily edit regular pages.

Frameworks are libraries turned on their heads. You plug a library into your code; a framework turns this around by abstracting a particular problem in such a way that you plug your code into it to solve a problem. It's the Hollywood principle: "Don't call us; we'll call you."

People who write frameworks have deep knowledge of a particular problem domain. They usually represent the distillation of several attempts to solve a problem, with best practices, clear abstractions, and good plug-in points made clear from long experience.

Django is a Python framework for web applications that have a browser front end and relational databases for persistence.

That's one example of a framework.

A CMS (Content Management System) allows users to dynamically add and manage content in a web application. I think they solve slightly different problems from Django, because it is specialized to the problem of content management.

I'd recommend starting your queuing problem without a front end at all - just text. Concentrate on the subtleties of queuing. Get that right with your object model and then expose a user interface to display it to users.

CMS is a 'content management system'. If provides modules that you can plug in. The end effect is it sets up a website for you, and you have admin pages where you can enter content. For special stuff, you use plugins. If you have to, you can write your own plugins.

A development framework is just a stack of technologies you can use to develop an application. So for example, the Grails framework uses Hibernate(persistence) and Spring(dependency injection and other stuff) under the covers -- it is providing and using existing tools (which are themselves frameworks) which you will in turn use to build the application.

With a framework, you basically start with a bunch of tools in your toolbox, but little or no parts of a running web app out of the box. You have to develop the functionality with the tools. With a CMS system, it's like they have implemented something for you, but it is really generic and you will have to tailor it to your needs.