Ever since I learned about the QR codes initiated in Asia, I have wanted them to take off over here. I was hoping that QR code support would be in Android, and maybe that could bootstrap the system. I am all ready to print a QR code on my business card that points to my website etc. Great stuff.

Then, ZXing was released on Google Code which gives me exactly what I want:

ZXing (pronounced “zebra crossing”) is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode reader library implemented in Java. Our goal is to support decoding of QR Codes, Data Matrix, and the UPC family of 1D barcodes. It will provide clients for J2ME, J2SE, and Android.

Why? There are several great readers out there, and there are bits of open-source code already for decoding, but not both at the same time. We want everyone to have access to some great source code to play with, so we decided we’d try an experiment, and open up our in-progress effort. Maybe some of it will be useful to you — maybe you can help improve it.

Will this be the best reader ever? Well we hope it gets quite good. Things are far from perfect, and it’s hard to top some of the great (native-code) readers out there. No, we primarily hope to provide a solid base of code from which people can derive other implementations, and to which people can submit new, better code. If this helps raise the quality of readers everywhere we’ve all done our job.

You know it is serious when you see a trial over in the adwords side of the house!