Near Field Communication (NFC) is a promising contactless technology to be integrated into mobile phones. There are different operating modes like acting as a smartcard, reading external tags as well as establishing a peer-to-peer connection with a second NFC device. Applications for example like payment, ticketing or smart-poster use cases can make use of this technology. The SIM card – acting as a secure data container -- will play a major roll in an ecosystem implementing such applications.
At the moment there are three different application platforms for NFC applications. The first one is J2ME. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on the mobile device has access to hardware related features thought APIs defined by the JCP (Java Community Process). The JSR257 Contactless Communications API is designed to use con-tactless technologies, like NFC, of a handset to exchange data. Secondly the JSR177 Secure Applications and Trust Services API implements the access to resident smartcard chips like the SIM Card.
The other two approaches for implementing NFC applications are SIM Application Toolkit (SAT) and Smart-card Webserver (SCWS) make use of the SIM Card as an application platform. SAT supports a basic set of commands for application development and runs nearly on all phones available on the market. SCWS is a more sophisticated implementation providing the user a web based GUI. Both SAT and SCWS are capable of using hardware related function of the mobile device through the Bearer Independent Protocol (BIP).
In the following paper we evaluate these applications platforms with regard to different criteria like usability, GUI design, security, portability, manageability, platform independence and afford/possibilities for developing applications. The evaluation is based on the implementation of a contactless wallet for e-cash. The wallet stores the amount of e-cash in the secure element which can be topped up over the air (OTA). The reader of the paper gets a sound understanding on the different of the application platforms and all tasks that are related to imple-menting, deploying and servicing such applications.