> Hi. I'm wondering what the status of this project is. The last code
> drop was apparently early December, 1999. Also, all the news, etc is
> likewise dated. I did note that this mailing list has kept seeing
> activity.
> So, I was just wondering what's up. Is the code good enough that no
> changes have been needed for 2 years? Is there some other API which has
> made opencard obsolete? Did everyone just lose interest in interfacing
> to smart cards from Java?
In part, yes. The card/terminal vendors seem to be quite negative about
Java and smartcards (apart from JavaCard on the card itself). They
recently proposed that they would disband the OpenCard committee while
making the source code freely available. Myself and others are not very
happy about this, to say the least! We do not know of any widely used
alternative to OCF for writing Java smartcard host applications. You
would have thought that this was a strong requirement (for Sun at least)
given that JavaCard puts Java on the card itself. Sun abandoned their
defunct Java Wallet which was roughly equivalent to OCF I think. Perhaps
they will revamp that.
OCF 1.2 itself is OK. It works quite well, and there are no major
problems except some confusingly mis-assigned "deprecated" warnings on
some methods, and a lack of cryptographic and key/certificate management
CardService definitions (apart from Signing-related). The architecture
can be a bit hard to follow at times given the slightly poor
documentation.
The CHV mechanism is also a bit clunky if you ask me (cancelling a CHV
prompt dialog does not return a null, so you cannot tell between
cancellation and a blank pin). However we have a free working project
based on OCF (DCSF � http://www.wangjammers.org/smartcards) where we use
a custom CHV dialog that returns null when cancel is pressed.
> Just wondering. I'm new at all this smart card stuff.
Prepare for a roller-coaster ride :-)
We have a few links to resources on our site.
Http://www.wangjammers.org/smartcards/links.html
Regards,
Marc
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ W ~~~~~
(o) Wangjammer5 (Marc Palmer)
( ) Wangjammer7
www.wangjammers.org = Java Consultants (Web|Smartcards|Crypto)
---
> Visit the OpenCard web site at http://www.opencard.org/ for more
> information on OpenCard---binaries, source code, documents.
> This list is being archived at http://www.opencard.org/archive/opencard/
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