Ask HN: What tools are needed to create an application that uses smart cards?

A friend makes POS software, and needs to implement a loyalty program that uses smart cards. The loyalty program currently uses numbers generated by his software and printed on plain PVC cards as barcodes. Apparently, according to him, reading and writing to the chip on a smart card is not a very straight forward thing. Can anyone give advice? I need to help him because I print the cards, and if he doesn't hack the smart card thing, he'll lose the POS business to people with a working system that uses smart cards, and, sadly for me, they also supply the smart cards, and if a customer wants, the machines for printing and encoding those smart cards.