Using Read-a-Card to integrate RFID into your application

The use of RFID technologies such as Mifare, iClass and FeliCa for identifying and tracking users and objects is becoming more and more common, both in the workplace and in retail, transport and logistics environments. Many application developers are looking into how they can either use existing cards in a new way, or exploring how to issue cards and tags for new services and build a complete system around them.

If you are a developer, you may have been frustrated with the lack of information, open standards and available hardware and software components to enable the integration of RFID technology with your solution. Different readers, cards and protocols all mean that doing it on your own from scratch can be quite difficult and time consuming. And although choosing one particular technology or reader brand may short-cut some of this time, it is only at the expense of future flexibility and compatibility.

As well as the basic requirements of reading unique identifiers from different card types and with different USB smart card readers, you will probably also want a few ways to manipulate and handle this data, such as logging it to file, running a command or passing it to input fields in your software. You may also want to read specific data from secure sectors on a card, or link RFID data capture with a web-based server application running in a browser window.

Read-a-Card provides a solution to these requirements by enabling reader-independent RFID card reading functionality that can be easily integrated into software applications without any knowledge of the underlying technology or the low-level hardware interfacing techniques in Windows. Integrating contactless smart cards and RFID reading capabilities is as simple as installing the Read-a-Card software to run in the background, and plugging in a supported reader. You can then use convenient, high-level APIs to capture the data you need and feed it to your software, irrespective of whether it is running as a native Windows PC application or as a web-based solution.