Turning an Ugly Duckling into a Hollywood Swan

To seamlessly integrate the World Wide Web into its existing service, CompuServe faced two technical challenges: supporting the Internet protocols and getting the software front ends (i.e., the CompuServe access software and the Web browser) to talk to each other. Last spring, CompuServe delivered a downloadable Web browser, called NetLauncher, that could work from within a PPP (i.e., standard Internet) session established by the dialer built into the WinCim 1.4 interface. But if you'd already used WinCim to dial into CompuServe, you had to disconnect before dialing the PPP session.

The latest upgrade to CompuServe's Windows shell, WinCim 2.0 , lets you dial a single phone number and toggle between any Web browser and the CompuServe interface in th e same session. The improved integration is principally due to the Windows Sockets, or Winsock, DLL. Winsock presents a network-independent interface between Winsock-compliant applications. This interface sits on top of a network-dependent component that supports the specific networking protocol stack (usually, TCP/IP).

For the new version of WinCim, CompuServe programmers wrote a Winsock networking layer for both NetLauncher and WinCim. Both the Web browser and the CompuServe front end now hook into the Winsock API. This result is point-and-click access to both NetLauncher (or any other Winsock-compliant Web browser) and CompuServe.

CompuServe has also met the challenge of different software commands by adding translation algorithms to the mix. NetLauncher and WinCim can now talk each other's lingo. For instance, when a user types go politics in NetLauncher, it recognizes the command as being intended for a CompuServe Go page and passes the command in a message to WinCim.

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Where Winsock Fits In

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Due out this month, WinCim 2.0 integrates formerly separate interfaces for accessing CompuServe and World Wide Web services using WinCim and NetLauncher, respectively. Both will also now be able to access the same live PPP connection established by CompuServe's dialing software and exchange commands intended for each other's domains.