Inside Macintosh: Networking With Open Transport /

Preface - About This Book

This book, Inside Macintosh: Networking With Open Transport, describes the 1.3 release of Open Transport, a communications architecture for implementing network protocols and other communication systems on Mac OS computers. Open Transport provides a set of programming interfaces for applications and other software running on Mac OS computers. This book is about client programming only; it does not include information on how to implement Open Transport network protocol modules or device drivers. That information is covered in the documents provided with the Protocol and Module SDKs.

This book is divided into two parts: the first part provides a conceptual description of Open Transport and instructional examples of how to use it. The second part provides reference information. To get the most out of this book, read the chapters that cover general Open Transport concepts first. If you are planning to use an AppleTalk or TCP/IP protocol, read the protocol-specific chapters after you are familiar with Open Transport's architecture and general functions.

The first chapter "Introduction to Open Transport," defines many terms that are used throughout the rest of this book. This chapter also gives an overview of the Open Transport architecture and the way it is used to implement networking protocols.

The chapter "Getting Started With Open Transport" is an introductory walk-through a very simple Open Transport program that downloads a URL.

The chapter "Providers" describes the generic Open Transport functions that you can use with any provider. The chapters "Endpoints" and "Mappers" introduce functions that are particular for endpoint and mapper providers.

The chapter "Programming With Open Transport" talks about the structure of Open Transport programs and about how Mac OS interrupt levels affect program execution. The next four chapters, "Option Management," "Ports," "Utilities," and "Advanced Topics," focus on more specialized topics in Open Transport.

The chapter "TCP/IP Services" and the AppleTalk-specific chapters describe how to use the Open Transport implementations of AppleTalk and TCP/IP. The last chapter in the conceptual portion of the book, "Serial Endpoint Providers," describes how to use Open Transport with a serial driver.

"Open Transport Reference," the second part of this book, contains complete reference information about the Open Transport API, divided into chapters that correspond to the preceding conceptual ones.

At the end of this book are four appendixes: "Open Transport and XTI," "Result Codes," "Special Functions," and "XTI Option Summary."

• "Open Transport and XTI." This appendix describes the correspondence between the XTI and Open Transport client programming interfaces. Open Transport is a superset of XTI and therefore includes functions that are not defined in XTI. This appendix focuses on how general provider functions and endpoint functions correspond to XTI functions.

• "Result Codes." This appendix lists the result codes returned by the Open Transport-preferred C functions.

• "Special Functions." This appendix lists the functions that are callable at hardware interrupt time, the functions that are callable at deferred task time, and the functions that allocate memory.

• "XTI Option Summary" describes option types and option negotiation rules.

For More Information

If you are new to programming for the Macintosh, you can read the book Inside Macintosh:Overview for an introduction to general concepts of Macintosh programming. Other books in the Inside Macintosh series are helpful for specific information about other aspects of the Macintosh Toolbox and the Macintosh operating system. In particular, to benefit most from this book, you should already be familiar with the runtime environment of Macintosh applications, as described in Mac OS Runtime Architectures and Inside Macintosh: Processes. These and other documents published by Apple Computer may be found at

http://developer.apple.com

The information in this book constitutes only a part of the body of literature documenting the AppleTalk and TCP/IP protocol families and the XTI standard upon which Open Transport is based.

For more information about the AppleTalk protocol family, see the book Inside AppleTalk, second edition, which has detailed specifications for each of the AppleTalk protocols.

For more information about the TCP/IP protocol family, see any good book on TCP/IP. Two such books for information on TCP/IP protocol internals are TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 by W. Richard Stevens and Internetworking with TCP/IP, Volume 1 by Douglas E. Comer. For internet standards specifications, see

ftp://ds.internic.net/dtd/

For more information about the XTI standard, see X/Open CAE Specification (1992): X/Open Transport Interface (XTI). The Open Transport TCP/IP software modules are based on the UNIX Streams architecture. For more information about Streams, see UNIX System V Release 4: Programmer's Guide: STREAMS.

If you provide commercial products and services, call 408-974-4897 for information on the developer support programs available from Apple.

For information on registering signatures, file types, and other technical information, contact

Macintosh Developer Technical Support
Apple Computer, Inc.
3 Infinite Loop, M/S 303-2T
Cupertino, CA 95014-6299

dts@apple.com