Abstract
Multimedia systems are becoming increasingly networked, from streaming audio/video from internet sites to multiple networked sources and sinks within the home. Many distributed systems are adopting a "service based" approach. Middleware architectures from CORBA through to more recent architectures such as Web Services, UPnP and Jini use this terminology.
This tutorial looks at this important topic in distributed systems from a practical viewpoint, considering both concepts and the realisation of these concepts in current technologies. The topics will be
- concepts of service-based systems: advertisement, discovery, use, garbage collection
- representation languages for services
- directory and non-directory systems
- multicast and unicast advertisement and discovery
- service invocation
- other topics such as security and session management
- Service-based multimedia systems
- all topics will be illustrated by Java examples for web services, Jini and UPnP