Comment by Marco Alka on "Help on Developing a Time Attendance System with use of Barcodes Printed on ID Cards"

I highly discourage doing this project. There are very good and stable solutions with lots of configurabilty that will integrate in whatever intranet you already have.

Though, if you really have to do this, you might want to buy a desktop scanner with a driver which writes the barcode to std-in. All you have to do is put a terminal somewhere with that scanner (I would go for a Raspberry Pi) and open up the website.

As database, you really should use something stable. Use an enterprise product. Use a licensed MSDB or Oracle DB.

As DB and application servers (separated!) you should use virtual servers which run on clustered hosts (e.g. MS Failover Cluster).

Everything else is just writing some application which inputs data into some database. You probably should add a GUI for the employees and employers as well. I highly recommend using ASVS, as well as other OWASP projects, in order to secure the whole system. You might want to join the discussion in this question.

Also be very strict about who can access the database. You don't want your employees to "fix" their timestamps themselves...

Thats @maruru , I really appreciate this, and is there and solution that you can recommend for projects like this ?

Our company uses NovaTime, but there are a lot of options out there. Kronos is another popular option.

@wilforlan my company uses SAP + KABA. Since attendance systems are not part of my job, I do not know a lot of systems, so I would not dare to recommend one over another without testing them and maybe even paying a real consultant.

@maruru Please, explain why in 2016 still people think that "enterprise" = "stable", while dbs as PostgreSql, Mysql (with forks MariaDb/Percona) are running more than the half of database around the world..

My two cents: Mysql/MariaDB is really stable. DO NOT THINK about clustering and stuff until you need to - a full backup (codebase+db) done once or twice or N times at the begin is sufficient (on another machine, obviously)

@strae I never said that those DB systems are not stable. All I said was that I discourage building your own solution as this is a very delicate matter. It is about rather being safe than sorry. If only a single minute is wrong you can be in deep trouble (at least in some countries)

@maruru Ok, sorry, I misunderstood your comment then.. on the "dont build it by yourself" I strongly disagree however... this philosophy is the opposite of evolution, imho; And especially when you're working on Business projects, where usually the company is not meant to adapt to the software but the software must adapt to the company needs, custom solution are often the best... but all depends on lot of variables OP didnt give ;)

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