OPOS, full name

OLE OLE, Ole or Olé may refer to: * Olé, a cheering expression used in Spain * Ole (name), a male given name, includes a list of people named Ole * Overhead lines equipment, used to transmit electrical energy to trams, trolleybuses or trains Co ...

for Retail POS, a platform specific implementation of UnifiedPOS, is a

point of sale The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice f ...

device standard for Microsoft

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

that was initiated by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

, NCR, Epson, and Fujitsu-ICL and is managed by the Association for Retail Technology Standards. The OPOS API was first published in January 1996. The standard uses

component object model Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface technology for software components from Microsoft that enables using objects in a language-neutral way between different programming languages, programming contexts, processes and machines ...

and, because of that, all languages that support COM controls (i.e.

Visual C++ Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++, C++/CLI and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available ...

Visual Basic Visual Basic is a name for a family of programming languages from Microsoft. It may refer to: * Visual Basic (.NET), the current version of Visual Basic launched in 2002 which runs on .NET * Visual Basic (classic), the original Visual Basic suppo ...

, and C#) can be used to write applications. The OPOS standard specifies two levels for an OPOS control, the control object which presents an abstract hardware interface to a family of devices such as receipt printer and the service object which handles the interface between the control object and the actual physical device such as a specific model of receipt printer. This division of functionality provides a way for the application development to write to an abstract hardware interface while allowing the application to work with a variety of different hardware. The only requirement is that a hardware vendor supplies an OPOS compatible service object with their particular hardware offering. Typically a manufacturer of point of sale terminals will provide along with a terminal operating system an OPOS control object package with a software utility that is used to configure OPOS settings. Such a utility will specify the settings for an OPOS control object and indicate the service object to be used with a particular OPOS profile. When the point of sale application starts up, it loads the OPOS control object and the OPOS control object in turn loads the service object specified by the current OPOS profile. The Windows Registry is typically used as the persistent store for device settings. The hardware device manufacturer will normally provide a utility for device specific settings used by the service object.

Operating systems

OPOS can be deployed on the following operating systems: *

Microsoft Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

* Microsoft Windows 98 * Microsoft Windows ME * Microsoft Windows NT * Microsoft Windows 2000 * Microsoft Windows XP *

Microsoft Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

Microsoft Windows CE Windows CE, later known as Windows Embedded CE and Windows Embedded Compact, is a discontinued operating system developed by Microsoft for mobile and embedded devices. It was part of the Windows Embedded family and served as the software foun ...

* Microsoft Windows 7 * Microsoft Windows 8 * Microsoft Windows 10

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Opos Microsoft application programming interfaces Retail point of sale systems Standards

Operating systems

See also

References