The Differences Between POS Device Standards OPOS and JPOS

POS device standards are very useful in providing an application with a common interface to POS devices such as like receipt printer, barcode scanner, customer display, card reader, etc.

What’s OPOS?
OPOS: Full name OLE for Retail POS, which is a POS device standard for Microsoft Windows operating systems that was initiated by Microsoft, NCR, Epson, and Fujitsu-ICL and is managed by the Association for Retail Technology Standards. The standard uses component object model and, because of that, all languages that support COM controls can be used to write applications.

What’s JPOS?
JPOS: Short for Java for POS Devices, which is a standard for interfacing POS software, written in Java, with the specialized hardware peripherals typically used to create a POS system.

What are the differences between  and JPOS?
1. Operating system: OPOS was initiated to help integrate POS hardware into applications for the Windows operating systems. JPOS is operating system independent.
2. Language: OPOS uses COM technology, is therefore language independent and all languages can support COM controls. JPOS was initiated to help integrate POS hardware into applications for the Java language.

Nowadays, both OPOS and JPOS have become mainstream standards, and almost all POS devices support the standards.