Introduction and Roadmap

The following sections describe the contents, audience for, and organization of this guide— Using the Reader Simulator:

Document Scope and Audience

This document describes the Reader Simulator BEA WebLogic RFID Edge Server, its configuration options, and its graphical user interface (GUI).

This document is intended for Java programmers who develop RFID client applications by using the Application Level Events (ALE) API.

Guide to This Document

This chapter, Introduction and Roadmap, describes the scope of this guide, summarizes new features, and lists related documentation.
Using the Reader Simulator provides an overview of the Reader Simulator's capabilities, instructions on how to configure the simulator, and describes the Reader Simulator GUI.

Related Documentation

This document is a part of the WebLogic RFID Edge Server documentation set, which also includes the following documents:

Product Overview provides descriptive information about WebLogic RFID Edge Server, including use cases, key benefits, component architecture, functional overview, RFID concepts and terminology, and developer and RFID resources.
Installing WebLogic RFID Edge Server describes how to install and configure WebLogic RFID Edge Server.
Using the RFID Edge Server Administration Console describes how to use the RFID Administration Console GUI to configure ECSpecs, ECReports, RFID devices, filters, and workflows.
Programming with the ALE and ALEPC APIs describes the Application Level Events (ALE) and ALEPC programming interfaces (APIs) that you use to create applications that interact with WebLogic RFID Edge Server by reading and writing electronic product code (EPC) tags.
RFID Reader Reference describes how to configure the RFID devices supported by the RFID Edge Server.
Workflow Reference describes how to configure and use the workflow modules included with the WebLogic RFID Edge Server.
ALE and ALEPC Javadoc provides reference documentation for the ALE and ALEPC Java packages that are provided with the WebLogic RFID Edge Server software.

New Features in This Release

WebLogic RFID Edge Server Reader Simulator includes support for simulating Gen 2 tags; the following bullet describes the general level of Gen2 support for this release:

API support for advanced tag features, including all features of the EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 UHF RFID Air Interface Specification (commonly called Gen2)—This specification includes changes to the ALE API and the ALE schema and WSDL.

Gen2 introduces a number of new Edge Server features including:.

Reading and writing from the EPC, user memory, and Tag Identifier (TID) banks.
Locking and unlocking memory with a password.
Killing tags with a password.

See Programming with the ALE and ALEPC APIs and the RFID Reader Reference.