Candy:
Not quite. Check out the alt.technology.smartcards FAQ
at www.scdk.com/atsfaq.htm and you'll find 16 smart card
operating systems that can be put on cards. Smart card
operating systems are much like embedded system operating
systems in that there is no universal standard and due
to the incentive to get as much as possible out of the card
in each application situation it is unlikely there will be
for a while. Most of these smart card operating systems
have what you call "traditional" ISO 7816-4 file systems.
JavaCard is a card that runs a Java virtual machine. It
has nothing to do with the underlying operating system or
with the Java language for that matter. You can compile
non-Java languages for a Java virtual machine and you can
compile Java for most of the non-Java virtual machines
that are on the market. The virtual machine doesn't know
and can't tell how the byte codes it is running were generated.
They could have come from Fortran.
Both MULTOS and Smart Card for Windows are smart card
operating systems. Both have virtual machines for
which you can compile C or Basic or Java or ... Fortran.
Since your on-card applications will typically run on
an on-card virtual machine there are some questions that
you should ask about the virtual machine:
1) How efficient is it? This is both a time and space
question and obviously involves the quality of the
compiler(s) you are using assuming you aren't programming
in the byte codes themselves (which you may want to do in
certain situations).
2) What underlying operating system capabilities are made
available inside the virtual machine? Just like big iron
operating systems, it does no good for the operating system
to support some neat feature if it isn't made available to
application programs.
3) Since the same virtual machine can be put on top of many
operating systems, how compatible are all these instances
of the virtual machine? The major virtual machines on the
market have different approaches to insuring compatibility
at the byte code level with, as you'd expect, different
results.
I hope this helps.
Cheers, Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: Candy Ho Pui Shan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2000 2:50 AM
Subject: [OCF] The Smart Card OS
Hello,
I don't know whether it is appropriate to ask here.
However, as I am learning smart card, I hope some of
you may know it.
>From my understandings, I know that smart cards can be
classified into 4 classes:
(1)JavaCard, using Java OS
(2)Smart card with Multos OS
(3)Traditional file systems smart card (What kind of
OS?)
(4)Smart Card for Windows (What is the OS?)
(correct me if I am wrong)
However, according to Microsoft, "Microsoft's Smart
Card implementation will work with the Java Card (or
any other card) with the appropriate card service
provider installed." Does it mean that Microsoft does
not develop a smart card OS? Can you explain briefly
how the mechanism is?
Candy.
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---
> Visit the OpenCard web site at http://www.opencard.org/ for more
> information on OpenCard---binaries, source code, documents.
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> Visit the OpenCard web site at http://www.opencard.org/ for more
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