A General Brokering Architecture Layer and its Application to Video on-Demand over the Internet

GOAL -General brOkering Architecture Layer- is a service architecture which allows the development and the management of highly flexible, scalable and self-configurable distributed and service-oriented applications over the Internet. GOAL centres on a design pattern which decouples the design of service functionalities from the distribution concerns. A service wrapper is specifically responsible of the distribution aspects. The wrapper is weaved at runtime to its corresponding service by a dynamic proxy object. GOAL makes it possible to augment, in a transparent way, the behaviour of a software object in order to permit it to be remotely accessible. Current implementation of GOAL depends on Sun Microsystems’ Jini as the brokering/middleware layer. The paper describes GOAL and demonstrates its practical use through the design and implementation of a Video on-Demand system. Java Media Framework is used for pumping multimedia data at the transmitter side and for rendering purposes at the receiver side, RTP/RTCP protocols are used for multimedia streaming.