Bluetooth Everywhere

First of all, has anyone heard of JavaCard 3 technology, and why it is awesome? Not just, awesome, but earth-shattering-awesome? If your mobile application needs to handle any form of personal identification or security, then you should obviously know why smart cards are mentioned over and over. Billions of cellphones use smart cards to identify the owner (not the user) of the phone, and smart card technology is also used in dozens other use cases world wide.

So, as a mobile developer, you should have some fleeting interest in smart cards, SIM cards, etc. Now, for most developers, smart cards are NOT easy to program, and you have to communicate with the card with lots of byte streams (real fun stuff). Well, when Sun released the JavaCard 3 specification a few years ago, things changed dramatically since now you can write server applications that reside on the card. Let me repeat that…

SERVER APPLICATIONS THAT RESIDE ON THE CARD

This, of course, is a huge development that will leapfrog mobile identity services. Now, the purpose of this post is not to talk about the supreme awesomeness of JavaCard 3. The “Security Gets Personal” Blog by Eric Vétillard has an excellent post on that. The purpose of this post is to lament the sad fact that although the JavaCard 3 spec has been out since 2007, developers still don’t have the tools to create and test JavaCard 3 applications.

However, if you attended the M3DD conference this year like I did, then you know why I’m a happy person right now. Take a look at the confusing slide below, and I’ll explain afterward.

PlaySIM technology will allow you to use the Squawk JVM on your SunSpot device to emulate the JavaCard 3.0 JVM. This is monumentally-huge-and-exciting-information since smart card development has traditionally been a tedious and expensive process. By allowing developers to use SunSpot devices to program JavaCard 3 server applications, then Sun has signifcantly lowered the barrier to entry to get stared with this exciting technology. You should expect this technology to be released before the JavaOne conference this year.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 16:02 and is filed under JavaCard 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.