A Client-Server Design for Interactive Multimedia Documents Based on Java

In this paper a client-server system design and implementation for interactive multimedia documents is presented. The server provides the document scenaria, while the media objects reside in any http server. The client retrieves the scenario from the server and requests the appropriate media from the corresponding http servers. The client design covers widely the issue of interaction with external and internal entities in terms of simple and complex events. Moreover it maintains the high-level spatial and temporal synchronization requirements of the application. The whole framework has been implemented in Java using the RMI (Remote Method Invocation) client server communication protocol and the JMF (Java Media Framework) for handling multimedia objects. The system presents a promising approach for distributed interactive multimedia on the Internet and Intranets.