When retail giants such as JC Penney and Sears shout, Sun and Microsoft jump. This time, at the behest of these and other retailers they’ve agreed to write a single specification which defines how equipment suppliers can develop point-of-sale devices that support Windows and Java platforms. At an agreement reached a couple of weeks ago in Dayton, Ohio, Microsoft, Sun, retailers and third parties including Epson, DataFit, Siemens and NCR, agreed to define a high-level UPOS specification (universal or united, they haven’t decided yet) which will support two platform implementations; the Windows-based OLE POS (OPOS) and JavaPOS. The details, which will determine how useful UPOS is, still have to be worked out. Sun says they’re considering UML universal modeling and IDL interface definition languages and mapping tools that will spit out JPOS or OPOS output. By the end of this month, when Sun ships betas of the three JPOS APIs announced back in January (CI No 3,331) – including a currently absent device driver model and registry – the Java-based specification will match the two year-old OPOS feature for feature. Retailers, fearing the two would henceforth strike out on divergent courses, meaning device manufactures such as those building next- generation smart card readers would have to develop support for two application frameworks, decided to bring the horses to water and to make them drink. The UPOS committee will make its plan public at next month’s Riscon ’98 shown in Denver or at the National Retail Federation show in New York next January. Issues to be settled include whether new retail POS devices should be specified in JPOS and/or OPOS and submitted to UPOS for ratification or defined by UPOS with the Sun and Microsoft camps. JPOS and OPOS 1.3 spec will be grandfathered into UPOS. OPOS bridges pioneered by UK company Datafit (also available from Siemens and NCR) that map JavaPOS interfaces running on Windows POS terminals to drivers will still be required. Sun believes that once enough JPOS devices and applications are on the market retailers will want similar JPOS bridges. It’s going be showing a raft of third party JPOS devices at Riscon. UPOS hopes its work may also be taken on board in other markets. There is also supposed to be much discussion of using UPOS to define future generations of ATMs at a financial industries show in Stuttgart, Germany this week. And the hospitality industry, which now has both Windows and Java platforms defined for a range of uses including hotel room systems, is expected to register interest as well. Meanwhile, Sun is likely to raise the ante one step further. It’s evaluating the creation of a JavaStore of retail architecture technologies mirroring Microsoft’s ActiveStore. It could blend JavaPOS point-of-sale device specifications with Enterprise Java Beans and its Jini networked Java system and package up a back-end POS server environment. Then Sun would have a better way of selling the servers its makes its money off of. Moreover what it would really like to do is to get Microsoft to Dayton all over again, this time for UStore.
