Last time, we looked at the call control packages that make up part of
the Java Telephony API (JTAPI). Call control, we saw, is concerned with
initiating, modifying, and destroying the state of connections among two
or more parties on a telephone call.
Once parties on a call have a connection, they will most likely want to
do something with it. That is to say, they'll want to make noises that
the other party or parties on the call can hear. The noises, encoded as
an electronic signal, make up a media stream. The JTAPI media packages
interact with that media stream.
The media classes can be used for everything from generating dialtone
and other "user interface" sounds to coding Interactive Voice Response
(IVR) units in Java (IVRs are those "press one, press two" menu things
that everyone likes so much). In short, if a program needs to make a
noise on a telephone connection, or listen to and react to such a sound,
the JTAPI media classes need to be put into play.
The MediaTerminalConnection class defines a point at which a media
stream can be monitored or modified. MediaTerminalConnection acts as the
intermediary between the user's hardware and the relatively abstracted
media stream.
