POINT-OF-SALE AND DECLINING BALANCE SYSTEM, AND METHOD, HAVING A RELAY SERVER FOR FACILITATING COMMUNICATION BETWEEN FRONT-END DEVICES AND BACK-END ACCOUNT SERVERS

摘要

A point-of-sale and declining balance ("POS/DB") system, and method offacilitating transactions thereon, that utilizes a relay server to facilitatecommunicationbetween front-end devices and back-end devices that use different dataformats. Therelay server acts as a translator between the front-end device and the back-end accountservers. In one embodiment, a standardized data format for front-end device isintroduced that, when coupled with the relay server, isolates the front-enddevices fromthe complexities of various back-end account servers. In one aspect, theinvention is therelay server itself.