A case study in object-oriented modeling and design of distributed multimedia applications

This paper investigates the use of object-oriented techniques for the specification and design of distributed multimedia applications (DMAs). DMAs are a class of software applications with a range of strong - often conflicting - requirements of dynamicity, interactivity, real-time synchronized processing of several media types, network distribution, high-performance, fault-tolerance, load balancing and security. The development of complex DMAs can benefit from the adoption of object design methods and distributed objects implementation technologies. The paper describes the use of two modeling approaches, based on the standard UML modeling language, and on the TRIO formal specification language, respectively. The problem of defining steps to move from the UML or TRIO specification to a CORBA IDL implementation is addressed too. An experimental distributed Video-on-Demand system is used throughout the paper as a case study.