To ease the development and porting of Open NFC, a special NFC HAL Module was created (see General Principles) to pilot a specific NFC Chipset device remotely through TCP/IP connection.
The management of this connection is left to the tool called Connection Center. This tool is available only under Win32 environment.
Using Open NFC over the special Connection Center NAL module, or over a real NFC device is transparent for the application.
In case the Connection Center is used, the application calls the Open NFC API as usual. If a command must be sent to the NFC hardware, Open NFC calls the interface of the NAL module as usual. This NAL module (which is hardware-specific!) handles the complete hardware-specific handling (messages conversion, etc.) then sends the resulting command to the Connection Center over TCP/IP — which means the Connection Center may be executing on a different device. The Connection Center tool then redirects the message to the device selected during its initialization, and routes the answers back.
Please refer to the Connection Center documentation MAN_NFC_0904-106 included in Core and SDK Editions for a complete reference guide.
The Connection Center application requires the .NET Framework runtime version 3.5 to be installed. It is installed by default on Microsoft Windows Seven; but you may need to install this runtime on older versions of Windows. There are several methods of installation for this runtime:
The Android Reference Porting, for example, embeds the Connection Center NAL module. The typical use is:
In the Android Emulator, one configures the IP address of Machine B and enables the NFC feature. The Open NFC stack in the emulator connects to the Connection Center running on Machine B, and performs NFC initialization of the NFC Simulator. Once complete, the simulator can be used to present tags to the system, as if a real card was presented in front of a real hardware in the Android device.
This allows development of Android applications using NFC without the need for a real device. In Android devices with real NFC hardware, the NFC HAL module simply needs to be changed to address the local chipset instead of creating a TCP/IP connection to the Connection Center, and there is no change in upper layers (including the application).
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