What Is Rattail?

Good question maybe. First of all you may find RattailHistory interesting for background's sake.

Rattail is a collection of software projects born out of the "real world" of retail. At its core, rattail intends to be a framework which provides useful things - at whichever layer they're needed - to applications built within and for a retail-type environment. So, before it intends to be any sort of application whatsoever, it intends to be a framework. (In fact there are not yet any "official" rattail applications per se, though some custom/in-house apps are in production.)

Out of the Box

Since most of rattail's offerings are meant to be leveraged by other apps, rattail itself doesn't provide much to the end user out of the box. There is of course a command line interface to Rattail, but that won't expose much that's useful to ''your'' current situation necessarily.

However there are a few global commands which accept the --gui option and could be deemed useful; see RattailCommands for more info.

Developer Tools

Rattail intends to be the retail programmer's Swiss army knife, as well as it can. Some things it tries to provide for consumption by your next application:

general utility functions (e.g. barcode tools)
command line / options framework
common means of configuration / logging / etc.
GUI framework customizations
hardware interfaces
extensible database schema

Use of the database schema additionally makes available:

authentication / authorization API
workflow-based API with hooks

Planned Applications

Eventually we'd like to see the following become a reality:

web-based back-office system providing most common functionality
full, redundant point of sale system, administrable via the web back-end