At 09:17 PM 10/30/00 EST, you ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:

>These stubs get AOL 5.0 "Titanium" to the point where I realize I or
>someone more clever is going to have to figure out what tapi32 is spoze
>to do, particularly LineInitialize, LineOpen, and LineGetID.

LineInitialize initializes Tapi.
LineOpen opens a telephone line :-), that is, allows to make a call (among
other things)
LineGetID get the ID of either a line, an address or a call given its handle.
It's unclear for me why Aol needs this call.

Tapi is an interface very similar to ODBC; if you don't know ODBC, it means
that Tapi is just a switch between application programs and device drivers.
Device drivers writers have to provide a set of functions with names similar
to the Tapi  function names, just with a prefix.These drivers are doing all the
real work. Microsoft only provides a driver for a standard Rs232 line with a
Hayes interface and controls the whole of the PC telephony market with that.

In contrast to the Odbc interface, there is (AFAIK - there is something named
the 'Bayonne' project but I have never looked at it) no Unix implementation for 
Tapi, so there is no fast track to implement Tapi.

A Wine implementation would have to implement the whole app/driver
architecture, then a driver for a Hayes implementation, I guess it could
mean an interface to PPPD.

Needless to say, this is not a small task; more so because the original implementation
(a joint work of Intel and Ms) has been obsoleted by Tapi 3.0; now Tapi is done
with the favourite child of Ms : the COM interface. So to implement the current
Ms interface you will need to be :

- a competent COM programmer (something that is not common)
- an experimented telephony programmer (ditto)
- a software architect (since interfaces will have to be defined) (ditto)

and have some time on your hands :-)

If you restrict yourself to Tapi 2 the worst part can be avoided (the COM/OLE 
interface)
- I guess that Aol is not using it...

Gerard 


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