For the last few months I've been experimenting with NFC at work and also at home. Everything was pretty simple in the beginning; I was able to write tags from my Android phone and then read them immediately. Things got a bit more difficult at work when we wanted to do more than just read simple tags. We wanted a reader/writer device connected to a PC to communicate with the phones and this turned out to be much harder than I had anticipated!

The hardware we're using is the SCL3711, which is a fairly popular choice in the NFC development community. After months of struggling with another SDK, a Google search brought me to NFCTools from Adrian Stabiszewski. NFCTools is a Java-based library for NFC development and I highly recommend it to anyone looking into NFC. I know almost nothing about Java, but I was able to get a working application built in just a few hours that could successfully send urls via NFC to both of the Android phones we were using for testing; a Nexus S and a Galaxy Nexus.

I really can't say enough good things about this library; you can check out the demo here and then head to github to grab the files for yourself!