On the road to Bandol

The specification of the Next Generation Java Card (aka Bandol) will not be publicly available before beginning of 2008, but the information that has been disclosed so far is sufficient for developers to start thinking about the architecture of future applications. The JavaOne session by Jean-Jacques vandewalle and Laurent Lagosanto provides the appropriate material to start. Getting their slides is a must as soon as they will be available (I’ll post the URL’s to the slides of all applications mentioned here).

A Bandol application basically is a (very) small server application. Although targeted smart cards are more powerful than existing ones, the amount of information to be processed has also grown significantly. In the end, the programming model is much better, but developers still need to be very careful about both size and performance. That is the main challenge, with a variety of consequences: it is best to limit the amount of transmitted data, which makes AJAX attractive; in addition, the data on the card application will be necessarily limited, so mashups with external pages are a good idea.

There are plenty of tips and tricks defined in Jean-Jacques and Laurent’s presentation. And the best thing is that you can easily prepare for it today. Jean-Jacques admitted in an offline discussion that he had initially developed the demo application as a standard serrvlet, using a standard development environment. Of course, by doing that, some things need to be simulated, like persistence (but persistence by reachability from static fields is easy to simulate). Security will also need to be added later.

So, let’s not wait, and let’s start coding!