Published August 5th, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran
POS Device Standards
Some useful information about Point of Sale (POS) hardware device standards here.
A development team designing and implementing a POS application for a retailer faces a myriad number of decisions. (POS may be Point-of-Sale or Point-of-Service, depending upon a company’s marketing team.) One of the more vexing issues is the selection of and programming to the physical POS devices, including a POS printer, a bar-code scanner, and a credit/debit card reader.
Why has this been difficult? Because of the significant disparity in features, functionality, and programmatic interfaces from vendor to vendor, and sometimes even within devices from a vendor. Therefore, the application team has historically chosen and implemented interface logic for some mandatory set of devices for initial deployment, then added to this set as time allows or additional customers require.
If our suppliers were able to supply OPOS drivers for the POS hardware we’re using it’d make life a lot easier for us.