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RattailV2WhatIsRattail.md

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+# What Is Rattail?
+
+Good question maybe.  First of all you may find [[RattailHistory|RattailV2RattailHistory]] 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|RattailV2RattailCommands]] 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