BACKGROUND

The use of electronic devices has increased astronomically in relatively recent history. Electronics are now ubiquitous in not only homes, but also in offices and commercial enterprises. For example, electronic point of sale (POS) terminals and Island Card Readers (ICRs) have been introduced in a variety of commercial enterprises, such as grocery stores, gas stations and the like. The POS terminals and ICRs may be connected to software that uses different generic interfaces for processing interactions with a variety of entities, including both local and remote hardware, as well as remote commercial enterprises. However, the interactions of a POS terminal and ICR among the various entities has used different individual software packages and interfaces. This may cause significant integration and interoperability issues between the software packages installed separately for the different interfaces, as well for clients having to install multiple pieces of software (and updates for each piece) at different times. It would be desirable to provide a standard interface for POS terminals and ICRs to enable easy integration for developers and clients.

SUMMARY

The present application generally describes a method of providing interactions with multiple different hosts associated with a transaction. POS terminals, ICRs and computers, among others, interact with the hosts via a language-independent payment messaging interface in a payments server that contains APIs. The hosts include payment hosts, loyalty hosts and pinpads. APIs are Representational State Transfer (REST)ful APIs that receive and respond to HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests. The APIs are exposed for developers to provide testing of the server and access to interfaces to the hosts. The interfaces include an epsilon interface to process transactions and interact with the payment hosts, a sigma interface to process loyalty transactions and interact with the loyalty hosts, and a POSCache interface to interact with the pinpads.

