Native ATM interfaces in C and Java: implementation and experiences

ATM, the asynchronous transfer mode, represents a flexible transmission technology, which offers a set of new services to the user. In order to take advantage of ATM´s strength and to be able to integrate access to ATM services into applications, a powerful ATM application programming interface (API) is needed. At our institute, we have implemented three different variants of such an API for accessing native ATM functions. In this paper we first present the design and implementation of an ATM API in C for Digital Alpha workstations running Digital UNIX. We then describe a Java ATM API offering the socket programming environment Java programmers are used to, and finally a set of Java functions accessing the Windows NT Winsock 2 interface. We contrast the different philosophies and architectural approaches with each other and give throughput numbers