Zoom Suite is a point of sale and business management system for photography laboratories. It was originally written for my dad's business (The Photo Makers, who operated numerous stored around Patna a major city in India) by one of his colleagues and rebooted in the mid nineties by me to feature a better user interface and operate over a network.
The project originally a commercial interest but was later branded as an in-house project. I ceased to maintain it post the nineties as I moved away to pursue my career and stopped working with xBase variants.
The product as built using FoxPro a now defunct xBase variant.
During the later (1998-1999) years I attempted to export data from the FoxPro databases and send it across to an external web server where a PHP application would allow customers
This repository is an attempt to keep the source code that I spent many years building and maintaining as a relic of my earlier work. Zoom has no practical use and is being published here for purely academic purposes. I intend to document my thoughts on design and the environment.
The data files are missing at present, I am cleaning them up and will leave detailed instructions on how the backend worked. There's a Python library that can speak the original DBF file format in case you would be interested in inspecting the data.
The photography lab provided the following services:
- Sales of cameras, films and accessories
- Processing of films and printing photographs (various sizes)
- Specialist processing such as E-6
The business had direct customers (along with a loyal program) and agents (satellite businesses that would bring bulk work for processing and would be given a better price).
Zoom was a multi user system with authorization. It features extensive reporting for the business (most printed on dot matrix printers).