Physical personalization refers to embossing or laser engraving your name and card number on the plastic surface of a card. Electronic personalization refers to loading personal data into a card's non-volatile memory, for example, your personal key, name, and pin number. Initialization and Personalization vary from vendor to vendor and issuer to issuer. At this point, the Java Card is ready for use. You can get a Java Card from an issuer or buy it from a retailer.
Cards sold by a retailer are general-purpose, in which case personalization is often omitted.
Now you can insert your Java Card into a reader and send APDU commands to the applets residing on the card or download more applets or data onto the card. A Java Card remains active until it is expired or blocked due to an unrecoverable error. The execution lifetime of the Java Card VM is the lifetime of the card. When the power is not provided, the VM runs in an infinite clock cycle. The lifetime of Java Card applets and objects An applet's life starts when it is properly installed and registered with the system's registry table and ends when it is removed from the table.