The channel driver functions as the adapter that enables a channel to be used for a given device, business distribution channel, and communication protocol to connect with the transaction services of the toolkit. The channel driver is the access point to the application toolkit on the server side. A channel driver has the following responsibilities:
1 Establishes the unique channel session.
2 Breaks the channel request into a keyed collection of request data and header data that can be handled by the request handler.
3 Builds the channel context, which will be used to manage the state of the channel-specific data throughout the lifetime of the request.
4 Determines the channel handler the first time that the device accesses a specific channel and is registered in the handler registry.
5 Invokes the request handler to process the request.
The toolkit provides the ChannelDriver interface, which is intended to be implemented and used as a template to develop device drivers for additional channels and protocols. The toolkit also provides concrete implementations of channel drivers for devices using the HTTP communication protocol. The servlets com.ibm.btt.cs.servlet.CSEstablishSessionServlet and com.ibm.btt.cs.servlet.CSReqServlet are intended to be used as references when developing a new channel.