+smartcard+ aims to become the standard support library for smart-card
development on ruby. Right now, the project offers a PC/SC binding that is
working on ruby 1.8, under Linux, OSX, and Windows. Future plans include a high
level abstraction for the PC/SC binding  (plus any other bindings people need),
and an interface for Java cards.

= Installation

	gem install smartcard
Windows:: Select the <tt>win32</tt> gem.
OSX:: Install the Developer Tools to get +gcc+. Requires Tiger or Leopard.
UNIX:: You need a PC/SC provider. See the {BUILD file}[link://files/BUILD.html]
for details. The file also contains package lists for popular distributions.

= Documentation

The documentation you see was generated with RDoc. If you install the
+smartcard+ gem, you should be able to use ri to see the documentation. If
you're using the SVN version, you can <tt>rake doc</tt> to build the HTML
documentation yourself.

= License

+smartcard+ is released under the MIT license. This means you're free to do
whatever you want with it. However, it'd be nice to let the developers know if
you plan to include this in a distribution (bragging rights are always good).
The {LICENSE file}[link://files/LICENSE.html] has the license in legalese.

= Acknowledgements

+smartcard+ was developed by Victor Costan while working as a Research
Assistant for MIT, under
{Prof. Srini Devadas}[http://people.csail.mit.edu/devadas/], in the
{Trusted Computing group}[http://projects.csail.mit.edu/tc/].

The work is funded by a grant from
{Quanta Computer Inc}[http://www.quanta.com.tw], under the
{T-Party Project}[http://projects.csail.mit.edu/tparty/].

Kevin Redon <kevredon@mail.tsaitgaist.info> provided information and a failing
test case for ATR-based protocol detection, which is necessary if the PC/SC
driver doesn't do it automatically.

The other contributors are listed in
[the GitHub contributors list](https://github.com/costan/smartcard/graphs/contributors).