Revolutionize Your Point of Sale System with a Standardized Peripherals Framework

Maximizing Efficiency and Cost Savings with a POS Peripherals Framework

Published in

Engineered @ Publicis Sapient

6 min readMay 16, 2023

With the advancements in technology, businesses are now able to integrate multiple peripherals with their POS systems. This has led to the emergence of a standardized peripherals framework, which can help businesses streamline their operations and achieve better returns on investment (ROI). Standardizing peripheral devices used in POS systems can greatly benefit businesses by providing cost savings, compatibility, reduced maintenance, improved scalability, and above all, time-to-market for competitive features. This article discusses different standards available for integrating POS peripherals and their limitations. It also provides details on how standard specifications like OPOS and JavaPOS work and can be leveraged to build standard frameworks, and solve for the major challenges faced by retailers on device integration.

Problem: In the past, each POS device vendor had its own proprietary way of communicating with its hardware devices, which made it difficult to develop applications that could work with multiple vendors’ hardware.

Solution: Standardizing peripherals helps to build POS systems that are vendor-agnostic and also offers several benefits which are explained in detail below.

Benefits:

· Compatibility: By using a standard interface, POS systems can work with a variety of peripheral devices from different manufacturers that best fit their needs without worrying about compatibility issues.

· Cost savings: Standardization promotes healthy competition among manufacturers by no vendor locking and also there is no device integration development cost when we switch device from different vendor.

· Reduced maintenance: Using a standard interface can also simplify maintenance and support for peripheral devices. Since the interface is standardized, it can be easier to troubleshoot issues and replace devices when necessary.

· Improved scalability: Standardizing peripheral devices can also make it easier to scale up or down the restaurant point of sale system as the business grows or changes. This can save time and money in deploying and configuring peripheral devices.

Unleashing the Power of Standardization:

Understanding Standardization:

There are several standards available for integrating POS peripherals:

UPOS implementation Standards & their Differences

How OPOS and JavaPOS works:

OPOS:

A POS application which needs to communicate with OPOS standard devices needs to interact with the common control object library. This can be downloaded from http://monroecs.com/oposccos_current.htm.

For each device, there will be an OCX file (ex: OPOSCashDrawer.ocx). This OCX file needs to be registered in windows registry. Based on the tech stack used in POS application, we can create an object of this Device class (ex: If we use .Net then we need to create a COM callable wrapper Dynamic Link Library (DLL) using Type Library Importer Tool (Tlbimp.exe) by passing the OCX file as param and use the output DLL in our project), register for events and call methods on it to communicate with the device.

The Open Method of the Device class will take the device logical name as parameter and based on the passed logical name, it will refer the windows registry and create service object. If we have to switch to a different device from another vendor, then we have to just pass the right logical name of the device to the control object, and there is no code change required.

Registering and configuring the service object is outside of POS application development. Typically, the device manufacturer will provide an installer which will take care of registering service object with its logical name, configuring device settings like port/baud rate and also install required OS device drivers.

JavaPOS:

JavaPOS works in the same way except the COM technology. JavaPOS controls can be downloaded from https://github.com/JavaPOSWorkingGroup/javapos-controls. To create object of device control class, we need to have this JavaPOS control JAR file on our class path. Also after installing the vendor provided driver, we need to add the device service mapping to Jpos.config and place the service control JAR file on class path.

The Open Method of the Device class will take the device logical name as parameter and based on the passed logical name, it will refer the Jpos.config file and create the device service object. If we have to switch to different device from another vendor, then we have to just pass the right logical name of the device to the device control and there is no code change required.

The major challenges faced on device integration:

Non-Standard: Despite the availability of standards like UPOS (OPOS, JavaPOS), and WS-POS, many large retailers still use devices that do not support any of these standards and instead rely on custom proprietary implementations for device communication.

This can result in several challenges:

Unlocking the Benefits of Standardized Peripherals

To overcome the limitations, we need to make some additions to the peripheral standards, so that it can support futuristic applications and technology needs.

· The first step is to separate the device integration logic from the POS application, so that it can be changed, tested, deployed, and configured independently.

· Add an extra layer on top of OPOS/JPOS to support platform-independent communication channels such as HTTP. This will enable the integration of devices with any tech stack or platform.

· Ensure that these device services are dynamically discoverable to reflect the current environment accurately instead of relying on static configurations that will not work when the device is removed or disconnected.

· Add an API gateway, such as NGINX, between business and device services, to achieve security and uniform access from one place.

· Write service objects/device services for non-standard devices in newer programming languages, so that they will also support standard and enable unified communication. This will also eliminate the need for developers with legacy skill sets.

· Develop simulators in the form of service objects/device services, so that the POS application or business services can be automatically tested. This will also help to develop and test complex scenarios without physical devices.

· Use tools like OpenTelemetry to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help analyze your software’s performance and behaviours.

Modern POS Application Reference Architecture

ROI with a Modern POS Peripherals Framework

Isolation (Self-contained, independent app for scale for each peripheral -Microservices design)

Fully utilize 64 Bit OS advantages
Reduces testing time (Lab/Manual Tester/Travel) by unit/BDD tests.
Reduces Deployment time as its independent unit.
Allows for independent testing and shift left methodologies.

Support for device standard (OPOS/JPOS)

No vendor lock (allows one to negotiate and close a deal with less spending)
Faster Time to Market
Device Failure Recovery
Standardization

Modern Programming Language

Unified device communication by moving to industry standard.
Removes developer needs with legacy skillset, dependency & cost.
NFRs (Performance & Security)
Reduce downtime  more order taking customer satisfaction.
Power Saving  Sustainable  Environment-friendly
Reduce Operator Costs
Secure & reduce attacks.

Cross Platform

Reduces license cost.

Conclusion:

Using industry standards like UPOS can greatly benefit the development and integration of point of sale peripherals. Adding platform independent communication channel, peripherals management, device discovery, API Gateway, security on top of existing standards will add more benefits to retailers. These standards provide a unified management, communication which enables different hardware and software components to work together seamlessly, reducing complexity, development time, and costs. Additionally, standards-based solutions tend to be more stable, reliable, and maintainable over time, ensuring long-term compatibility and interoperability with other systems. While there may be some challenges and limitations to using standards, the benefits are often worth the investment.