Application Development

Design Principles

The Application Programmer's Interface for all readers has been designed with the following principles:

Simplicity - It is intended that an interface is designed that makes it very easy for end user application programmers to write applications. It is as simple as it can be given what we want to be able to achieve with the readers.

Network - Given the widespread use of networks in corporate environments, the API is based on TCP/IP networking, the underlying protocol of the Internet and many private networks. A variety of network services provide remote clients access to the functionality of the reader.

Flexibility - Conventional embedded systems usually have hard coded command protocols, which means the application writer is limited to the flexibility that the system designer put in. In the Magellan reader system, the programmer uses a scripting language to control the reader. The power of this language allows programmers to implement functionality on the reader that the reader designers had not considered.

Intelligent - Readers can be programmed with scripts to automatically respond to tags in the way most appropriate to the end user application. This way, the performance of the system is not limited by communications overhead to the user's system.

Portability - All interaction with a reader is based on plain text. This avoids platform and operating system dependencies such as byte ordering, byte padding and locale. This is common for many network based servers, such as Web and e-mail.

Consistency - An application written for one reader should work with all readers. A given operation has the same name in all readers. Differences in reader hardware are accommodated as transparently as possible.

Communicating With A Reader

Developing reader applications does not require any SDK to be installed. Communication to a reader involves creating a network socket connection and then sending and receiving plain text. Any programming language that supports sockets can connect to a reader.

The Programmer’s Guide documents all the API commands available on the readers.

It is possible to define custom scripts in the Python language to be run on the reader. This advanced feature allows readers to be set up to run as intelligent self contained devices that process the tag replies and other events in the way required for the end user application. Applications written in any programming language can define scripts on a reader.