Taming the Complexity of Distributed Multimedia Applications
Frank Stajano and Rob Walker
Olivetti Research Limited
United Kingdom
Abstract
The Medusa environment for networked multimedia uses Tcl to compose
applications out of low-level processing blocks called modules. A
medium-sized application such as a two way multistream videophone
already uses around one hundred interworking modules, running in
parallel on several host machines. This paper shows how we overcome
the inherent complexity of such applications: to deal with parallelism
we use a multi-threaded library hidden behind a single-threaded Tcl
interpreter; to build higher order components than the modules we use
the object oriented extension [incr Tcl]; and to exploit the variety
of available input and output devices we adopt the
Model-View-Controller paradigm.
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