Yesterday, I stopped by the Sun/Gemalto contest booth, to try writing a little robot strategy, because I was a bit lazy to set up everything by myself on my computer. So, they brought me on a computer, where I edited my robot, and tried to make it better.
It went through a little trial-and-error process to get my robot going, but the truly amazing thing is that, throughout the entire programming experience, I never felt that I was programming a card. No stupid casts, no need to use byte arrays to store data, no need to think about allocating objects. Nothing but plain Java coding. And the proof of it is that, the entire time, I was surrounded by other competitors, and I am quite convinced that I am the only who had previously developed a Java Card applet.
Getting the application on the card gently reminded me of the device I was talking about, as loading, linking, and verifying class files takes several seconds. Still, not too much pain. Also, when competing, the robot was a little less responsive when running on the card (compared to the same robot running on Sun’s Reference Implementation).
Overall, developing for and running code on a real Java Card 3 card has been a really good experience. The icing on the cake is that, as of yesterday’s evening, I was third in the race, tied in points with the two leaders. I don’t have much hope for today, as I do not have much time to spend on this.
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