ERCIM News No.26 - July 1996 - GMD
TANGRAM - A Framework for Multimedia Tele-communication Applications
by Klaus-Peter Eckert
The TANGRAM project is designed to develop an object-oriented framework
for multimedia tele-communication applications and their management with
respect to the diverse architectures introduced by the Telecommunications
Information Networking Architecture Consortium (TINA-C). It is based on
distributed object technology introduced by the Object Management Group
(OMG). TANGRAM is a three year project sponsored by De Te Berkom and is
being carried out at GMD-Institute for Open Communication Systems.
Until recently, the development of application supporting middleware in
the fields of distributed systems, network and service management, telecommunications,
mobile communications, security, and databases were performed independently
of each other.
Due to the possibility of creating innovative services and due to high expectations
and requirements of potential service providers, service users, middleware
providers, and network providers, there exists an increasing need to integrate
these approaches. Furthermore, the technical developments already in existence,
and those which are expected in the near future, both permit and require
the implementation of uniform concepts for future telecommunication applications.
Corresponding activities are reflected in the convergence of once independent
modelling approaches such as the Open Distributed Processing (ODP) reference
model, the Service, Network, and Management Architectures introduced by
TINA-C and the Object Management Architecture (OMA) introduced by the OMG.
The GMD-project TANGRAM provides a basis for the implementation of these
future-oriented developments. The main goal of the project is the development
of a prototype of a TINA-C compliant framework supporting the employment,
subscription, and execution of accountable, multimedia tele-communication
applications. This work includes the evaluation and validation of the TINA-C
concepts.
A further goal is the development of an underlying Distributed Processing
Environment (DPE), based on OMG's CORBA 2 technology (Common Object Request
Broker Architecture). Using commercially available CORBA 2 implementations
like IONA's Orbix or Hewlett Packard's Distributed Smalltalk together with
various CORBA services, TANGRAM provides a homogeneous environment on top
of a network of cooperating subcomponents running on heterogeneous software
and hardware platforms.
TANGRAM will additionally evaluate available middleware products with respect
to their ability to support telecommunication applications and their degree
of interoperability with existing and emerging products like Microsoft's
OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), OpenDoc, or the World Wide Web. For
more details on TANGRAM refer to http://www.fokus.gmd.de/ovma/Tangram/entry.html
Please contact:
Gerd Schuermann - GMD
Tel: +49 30 25499 213/200
E-mail: schuermann@fokus.gmd.de
or Klaus-Peter Eckert - GMD
Tel: +49 30 25499 227/200
E-mail: eckert@fokus.gmd.de
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