Re: Elementary Questions: Java And Reading Security Cards
Steve wrote:
I have some very elementary questions.
Where I work we just hooked up card readers to our PCs, either by card
readers in the keyboards or via USB card readers.
What are these type of cards called?
IIRC, "smartcards".
Can server side Java be used to read information off of these cards?
All you need is a way to connect the ends.
(Making it sound simple, but not necessarily easy.)
If so what are the names of the libraries, APIs, extensions etc that I
would want to investigate?
HTTP. RMI. Web services.
If your card reader is here, and your server is there, you need one of two things
to connect the two - a really long wire or a radio or a network. Okay, three.
Presumably your reader is on the "client" side of the client-server exchange. You
need hardware to connect it to the connection, so to speak.
Example I use - I sometimes debug smartphones. The communication locally would
be between the phone and the PC via a socket that a driver translates to USB signals.
Now I have my test environment on a server over there, but my phone on my
workstation over here. I connect to there from here via SSH, with reverse port-forwarding
to convince the server that port 6666 (for example) is the one at my end. So the server
talks over an SSH tunnel to my port 6666 thinking it's its own local 6666. It's just
like being there, only slower.
--
Lew