Continuous media support in the distributed component object model

The demand for a great variety of sophisticated telecommunications services with multimedia characteristics is increasing. This trend highlights the need for the efficient creation of distributed programs with multimedia data exchanges running on distributed processing environments. Therefore, it is necessary to support the objectoriented development of distributed multimedia applications in a flexible manner. This paper recognises Microsoft’s Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) as a key potential technology in the area of service engineering and examines a structured approach to enhance it for the handling of continuous media streams through the design and implementation of a collection of suitable multimedia support services. The proposed approach focuses on the modelling of continuous media communications in DCOM and is validated through the design and implementation of a multimedia conferencing service. Though the approach is targeted to DCOM, the paper lays a set of concrete concepts for realising stream interfaces in distributed object platforms.