Good news first? Ok here they are: The IrCOMM endpoint it working transparently. The last changes included asynchronous sending, missing is still a nice packaging and a configuration method. In this incarnation, it should work for all IrCOMM connections via NewtonScript. And this brings us to the bad news...
The PPP serial driver does something fairly unusual. While it starts out instantiating a regular serial endpoint (which we can then replace with our enhanced IrCOMM endpoint), it then talks to the IrDA comm tool directly. This is unusual for several reasons: The comm tool interface is not visible on the NewtonScript side, it is not really intended to be called directly (only indirectly through the endpoints) and there is already an endpoint available for data transfer. I didn't dig deeper into this, but I suspect that this was either easier for the people implementing the PPP serial driver or that the PPP serial driver is derived in a strange way from the serial or IrDA tool.
Anyway, by talking directly to the comm tool, our IrCOMM endpoint is bypassed and cannot do its magic. The solution: Implement an IrCOMM comm tool derived from the IrDA tool. Paul Guyot has suggested that from the beginning but I had the feeling that a modified endpoint might be a bit easier. There is some uncertainty about the complexity of a comm tool but it might indeed be not too hard...
Posted by Eckhart at February 12, 2003 10:15 AM