Building distributed applications using the ANSA principles, perhaps using a CORBA compliant product, is currently limited to operational style interactions; real time and multimedia capabilities are not available. Writing multimedia capable distributed applications is possible with tools such as Vic, but these tools are difficult to use and provide programers no or limited control over system resouces from their application programs. This leads to applications which are not portable or hard to maintain.
Business requires all kinds of applications, including those which require a variety of multimedia, real time and network control capabilities: multimedia conferencing applications need to run side by side with billing applications and ATM network management applicatons for instance. Diverse applications require different resources and guarantees from the distributed processing environment (DPE). One DPE cannot cater for the whole spectrum of requirements.
The adaptor and stream concepts are introduced to deliver plug-and-play distributed conputing infrastructures and multimedia capabilities respectively.
The relationships amongst the projects in this area are described here.