ecfbabel

ECFbabel Overview
This project is about fiscal printers used in a retail automation applications on the POS (point of sale) side. There are many equipaments, from different manufacturers, each one with different sets of commands (and subtle behavior differences) to achieve the same goals.
These differences makes the development of a POS a chalenge. Developers must deal with subtles and the application complexity increases as many fiscal printers their software must support. Code becomes hard to mantain and the overall application tend to run out of control.
Specially in Brazil, the great majority of developers have used procedural programming languages and so the complexity to support two or more different fiscal printers within the same POS application turns development strongly hard and full of malabarisms.
I believe that many development groups are considering to switch to Java because of it's robustness and portability, but (on the side of POS) the fiscal printers still in there (it's a requeriment, not a feature) with their differences and subtles. "In home" development increases the application costs and is error prone because the teams needs to deal with many other aspects of a POS, of course.
Project Goals
ECFbabel project attempt to aliviate the pain of adding support for fiscal printers through a common interface. Some groups (or one?) in Brazil are trying to specify a common interface, but their projects are tied to a misconcept: the developers in some point are forced to deal with uncompreensive blocks of unusable data and must put-their-hands-in to extract some usefull information.
The main concept of ECFbabel project is to completely hide the communication with the fiscal printers (today, made through a serial port -- RS-232) and the data returned by the device. Using ECFbabel, developers will deal with common primitive types (ints, booleans, etc) and common java objects. They never need to "dissecate" byte blocks and then convert sets of bytes to dates, or money values, or something like that.
Many other features are planned to achieve much more of the common requeriments. One of the most notable is the hability to recover from an unexpected power interrupts. ECFbabel core classes are able to persist current ticket information and restore the previous order when power becomes available.
Finally
This project will treat fiscal printer for the brazillian tax legislation. So I believe that ECFbabel cannot be usefull in other countries with similiar equipaments. So the class names, method names and API java docs are written entirely in brazillian portuguese.