Hi,
The New Serial Manager will be part of a general ROM upgrade slated to come
out later this summer. It is _not_ part of Palm OS 3.2. Can you send me a
pointer to the doc that mentioned it as part of 3.2? The upgrade will be
available for all 3.0 and later devices.
The IR Enhancement package is an interim solution which does not include the
new Serial Manager. What it does is provide a replacement library (the IrComm
library) which can be used as a wholesale replacement for the serial library. It
has exactly the same API, so what you could do is do a SysLibFind on the IrComm
library instead of on the serial library, but still use the serial library call
interface. The Enhancement also includes a Preference panel that allows users to
switch to IrComm for _all_ attempts to open the serial library.
The new Serial Manager on the other hand uses the notion of "Connections". A
Connection is simply a named setup for a particular serial device. The device
could be the main serial port, an IrComm port, the raw IR serial interface or a
replacement serial driver that someone else has written. Applications can use
the old serial library, in which case they always open the "current" connection,
or use the new API. The new API allows an application to select from among the
defined Connections, or to specifiy a particular serial driver to use. There
will be also be a way to simply say "Open the main serial port" or "Open the
IrComm port if any". As well there will be an API for third-parties to write
their own serial drivers, either for physical devices (really only useful for
licensees), or for virtual devices (software only drivers, IrComm is an
example), or to provide functionality for an existing device that existing
drivers don't provide (for instance a driver for the serial device that provides
performance guarantees that our driver can't or won't).
In essence what the new Serial Manager does is move the device selection
abstraction down a level. Previous to this you selected a device based on what
library you selected. This leads to a number of wierd cases where developers end
up needing to re-write and/or replace the serial library if they want to use a
different device, or do anything really different underneath the covers (like
IrComm). Getting the rest of the system (especially HotSync or TCP/IP) to use
this new serial library is not easy to say the least. With the new architecture
the library determines an API only, not the device to use. Developers can then
develop their own "device" which does what they need and the entire system will
use that device when asked to. HotSync over a multiplexed serial port would work
just fine for example. HotSync over IrComm becomes downright trivial.
Cheers,
Bruce Thompson
Sr. Developer Support Engineer
Palm Computing Inc., a 3Com Company
----- Original Message -----
Date: 24 Jun 1999 14:02:29 -0700
From: "Thompson, Bart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: New Serial Manager and IrComm
I installed the Ir enhancement set of files and did some testing. It appears
that I can make use of the IrComm facilities in my app with this addition.
>From the online docs it appears that the New Serial Manager is only availabe
on devices with OSv3.2. I checked and my PalmVII is version 3.2 so I am
confident that I can control activate IrComm using the SrmOpen() call on
this device, but that does not help much with PalmIII's ( the target for my
app)...
The questions are these:
1) Is OS v3.2 ( and therefore the New Serial Manager ) available on the Palm
III.? If not, is there a way to flash the new OS into the box.?
2) Does the IR Enhancement package give the same functionality or include
the New Serial Manager. In other words can I install this package and be
able to call SrmOpen() on the 'ircm' port??
I want to programmatically turn on and off the IrComm link without killing
the hotsynch via cradle.
- ----------------------------------------------
Bart Thompson
Senior Software Engineer
Client Development
USCS International
916.939.6132
[from my 95 box]
- ----------------------------------
