APE Telephony Device Obect Framework

The "APE Telephoney Device Object Frame" (tdof) offers a portable class
library for use with various native telephony drivers.  Drivers found
suitable for inclusion with tdof include those which both offer native
driver interfaces and have no alternate or widely established development
library under free operating systems (such as Linux, FreeBSD, etc).  For
the moment, this includes both the QuickNet cards (ixj) and ECCS Dialogic
driver (d41).  Other cards or specialized telephony hardware may be
supported in tdof as well in the future.

This initial public release covers only the QuickNet driver under Linux.
It is being made available early for design validation and feedback only
and is probably not yet suitable for actual application development.  Tdof
is free (GPL licensed) software and development is open to outside
contributors.

The telephony device frameworks are built upon the APE class library.  The
frameworks all make use of a base "port" class for the device which can be
derived to add features and functionality.  A service thread is also used
in tdof to manage both timers and event notification through callback for
the telephony device port classes.

While tdof is designed specifically as a driver/API model that is easy to
integrate with our ACS telephony server, the tdof libraries should be
suitable as general purpose telephony libraries for the specific hardware 
platforms supported.  For this reason, tdof is being made available as a
stand-alone package rather than as part of ACS proper.  Tdof does require
that APE is installed.

Any questions in regard to tdof should be directed to dyfet@ostel.com.

