Your intention is to deploy, or evaluate, the CrossWorks TCP/IP Library for use in your product. Before you begin, there is something very important that I must ask you to do: run on known-good hardware with tested software! You don't want to make your life complicated to begin with. You don't want to port the TCP/IP Library to an untested piece of hardware, as well as learn about the TCP/IP Library and, maybe, even learn CrossWorks at the same time. So, do yourself a favor and spend a little money getting a piece of hardware that is fully tested and that we know runs the TCP/IP Library well.
Suggestions? Well, the TCP/IP Library is primarily developed using the SolderCore, and as Rowley Associates manufactures the SolderCore we would recommend most highly that you purchase one, or more, of these to start learning how the TCP/IP Library works. You'll feel so much better running networking examples straight away, and then you can progress to other hardware and see how it works out for you.
This manual is written using the TCP/IP Library examples that come included with boards that are pre-configured, ready to run networking, as part of a CrossWorks Board Support Package. Not all Board Support Packages contain networking examples—they may not have them because we haven't supported the embedded or external network controller, or because they are too limited to run networking.
If you are familiar with TCP/IP networking, CrossWorks, and are comfortable skipping the manual and diving straight into code with a reference manual, that's great, go right ahead and try out some of the examples…
To try out the networking examples, there's very little that you need to know about CrossWorks and the Platform Library. All you need is a board that we ship examples for and a way to program it. If you want to start delving a little deeper into the examples, you will need to refer to the Platform Library user manual as the examples use Platform Library facilities to make the code portable over all the boards we support.
There are many examples that you can extract code from: inheritance by text editor is a tried and tested method of program development! Because all the support code is provided in source form, you can copy that into your application to get it working.