JAVA CARD DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS

Over the past year, I have received a number of comments and messages about development environments. Readers ask me which environment I use, and which one they can use. Sadly, I don’t have a good answer for now. Actually, I hope that this post will be a bit interactive, and that some comments will bring good answers for people who want to develop Java Card applications.

I use IBM’s JCOP tools. They work quite well, they are integrated into Eclipse, and they are even able to manage code on real cards (and not onlny IBM’s cards; I often use them with Trusted Logic’s jTop cards). Sadly, IBM has stopped working on JCOP, and a link on the original Zurich team’s home page indirectly points to a NXP e-mail address:

Please address requests for the JCOP Tools and activation codes to tools.jcop@nxp.com

“”

Now, that does not necessarily mean that you will be able to get the tools from that address, as the way in which NXP distributed the JCOP tools is not all that clear to me.

For basic developers, an alternative is Sun’s Java Card Development Kit 2.2.2. It works, but it is a pure Java Card engine, with no support for things like GlobalPlatform and, of course, no way to load applications on actual cards. You can therefore use it to write your first applications, but frustration is around the corner.

In order to address this problem, there is GPShell, but the version I found seems quite outdated.

Another alternative is to go with the vendors. Here are a few possibilities:

• Gemalto’s Gemxplore developer suite, mostly targeting SIM cards of all kinds. The products is expensive, but there is a free trial.
• Giesecke & Devrient’s Sm@rtCafé Professional Toolkit 2.0 is also available. I haven’t seen it in a while, but it the last demo I saw was quite nice, although not integrated in a standard IDE.
• Axalto’s Cyberflex SDK site is still up, but it does not look much maintained.

There are probably many more, but I haven’t found them, or I haven’t found if they could be bought.

Good luck to all people who are looking for Java Card development environments. And if you know of a good solution, please let me know, and I will spread the news.