An integrated development environment for RFID applications

In recent years we have witnessed a proliferation of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) middleware systems and projects (including several open source projects), which are extensively used to support the emerging wave of RFID applications. Some of the RFID middleware projects come with simple tools, which facilitate the application development, configuration, and deployment processes. However, these tools tend to be fragmented since they address only part of an RFID system (such as the filtering of tag streams and/or the generation of business events). In this chapter, the authors introduce an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for RFID applications, which addresses multiple parts of an RFID application, while at the same time supporting the full application development lifecycle (i.e. design, development, deployment, and testing of RFID applications). The introduced IDE comprises a wide range of tools, which have been implemented as modular plug-ins to an Eclipse-based environment. The various tools enable application development, deployment, testing, and configurations over the middleware infrastructure established by the AspireRFID (AspireRFID Consortium, 2013), and their evaluation has proven that they can significantly ease RFID application development.