Java Card Communications Access Layer

Latest News

Jaccal 1.0.3 has been released on 3 September 2006! Please click here for the release.

Jaccal 1.0.1 has been released on 25 August 2005! Please click here for the release.

Jaccal 1.0.0 has been released on 1 August 2005! Please click here for the release.

What is Jaccal?

Jaccal is a set of smart card communications API for Java applications. It is developed for Windows and Unix machines, accessing the smart card through the PCSC (Personal Computer Smart Card) layer on each platform.

Jaccal also provides a scripting engine and a script editor (Anubis) that allows developers to directly access the smart card.

Why Jaccal?

Jaccal was developed with the vision of allowing easy acccess to smart cards to more developers. Traditionally smart card access is through bits and bytes and through sending byte arrays to the smart card.

Jaccal aims to simplify this arcane process by adding a layer that is easy to understand for developers.

At the same time Jaccal provides a simple scripting interface (with a Swing-based script editor) for casual users who would like to easily extract information from the smart card.

What are smart cards anyway?

If you are new to the smart card industry, please click here for an introduction to this exciting new world!