Jetstream provides the programmer with access to explcit binding and streams facilities, currently missing from CORBA implementations.
Streams [APM.1393, APM.1696] allow applications to interface to typed directional data flows. These are often high bandwidth and time structured, such as continuous audio and video multi-media flows are.
Explicit binding [APM.1314] allows applications to choose and configure network protocols, connecting typed interfaces to specially created network endpoints and to dedicate resources to established bindings (via resource pools).
Streams and explcit binding therefore allow programers to achieve QoS control.
Protocol bindings are abstracted from an application via stream and (operational) object adapters. Adapters export IDL based control interfaces to an application for connection management.
Both the Jet IDL definition and the stub generator will be extended with support for streams and explicit binding. The extensions will support typed stream interfaces, allowing applications to interface to high-bandwidth streamed communications.
The design also facilitates diverse interaction models which may be partly supported via the automatic generation of adapter templates from the extended IDL and binder specifications.
The Jet API will be extended with support for application level threading, which will allow applications to perform concurrent processing of multi-media flows, as well as providing support for implementing resource controlled, multi-threaded CORBA servers.
Application level marshalling support will be designed to support application specific marshalling schemes, to be used for multi-media encapsulations or protocol specific type representations.
Jetstream builds on Jet which provides a CORBA based API based on a clean subset of the CORBA 2.0 C++ mapping. Jetstream extends the work to handle explicit binding and streams. Jetstreams will deliver code to run on the distributed processing environment resulting from Amethyst.
Completion is expected in October 1996.
For further details please contact Andre Kramer (ak@ansa.co.uk) or Nicola Howarth (njh@ansa.co.uk).