POS Systems
WORK IN PROGRESS - Please don't modify - Thanks - Alejandro
Contents
POS Systems - Introduction
The POS Systems must be analyzed separately from other environments based on significant differences that the requirements for this type of systems have.
Point of Sale systems (POS) are used in restaurants, hotels, stadiums, casinos, as well as retail environments. Maybe the most traditional use is in the stores; there a checkout (a check-out counter) is the aisle where people place items they have choosed to purchase from a store, such as supermaket or departament store. The cashier rings up each item on the cash register and obtains the total. The items are placed in bags and the customer can take them after paying.
In those environments the time is gold! This is a critical factor.
Device management
A very common issue in the POS systems are the Peripherals. They are a special devices used to operate in this type of environments. There are several types of peripherals and any POS system must be enabled to manage all them.
Some of those devices are (the most commons):
- Receipt/Invoice Printer
- Bar Code Hardware
- Electronic Cash Drawer
- Customer pole Display
- Programmable keyboard
- Magnetic, Smart or Chip Card Readers
Here is one of the more complexes issues: the selection and programming to the physical POS devices, because of the significant disparity in features, functionality and interfaces from vendor to vendor (and sometimes even within devices from a same vendor).
Basically there are two ways to do it:
- Via direct access to the device, using a communication protocol (i.e. Epson Esc/POS, UTC Standard, DSP-500, etc).
- Problem: Hardware dependent
- Via some standard defined to interconnect devices (i.e. OPOS, JavaPOS, UnifiedPOS)
- Problem: Alternative implementations, when the specification is not sufficiently descriptive (you can find different implementation for the same device).
Currently, the biggest devices vendors have done implementations of those standards (Epson, IBM, Siemmens, Sun, NCR, etc.).
To improve the ADempiere POS functionality we have two alternatives:
- The JavaPOS standard, which was developed to help integrate those devices into Java applications.
- The UnifiedPOS standard, initiated by a consortium of retailers, and is led by the National Retail Federation. Beginning with release 1.5, both OPOS and JavaPOS have delegated ownership of language- and operating system-independent POS device interfaces to UnifiedPOS. OPOS then maps these interfaces to COM within Windows, and JavaPOS maps them to Java.
Note: Beginning with the 1.7 release, only the UnifiedPOS document is released. Separate OPOS and JavaPOS documents are no longer maintained.
Distributed environments & Data Replication
The operation mode: A Closed Circle
Functionality Required
To be continued ASAP...