ATHOC: ATM applications over hybrid optical fibre coax

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 95.0084-3

Key words (English)

ATM; JAVA

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: AC037

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 4. Frame Research Programme - 1.2 Communications technologies

Short description (English)

See abstract

Abstract (English)

Marketing Services and Applications
The MediaMaster Service and Application

Target Users
The MediaMaster application has a broad spectrum of areas. The MediaMaster can be used for all applications like point of information (P01) or point of sales (P08) especially if they are working with multimedia information (pictures, sounds or videos). It also can be used as a video- or music-on-demand-system. The typical user of the application is a customer of a store, of a hotel, of a bank or an insurance, but also visitors of museums, travelers by train or airplane, etc.

Motivation
The main reason for the development of the MediaMaster application was a redesign of an existing application which was completely platform dependent. That system had its limits especially in the formerly existing network technologies. With the arise of technologies like TCP/IP and JAVA we had the possibility to write an application platform independent. To clear the hurdle of limitations by the network technologies we saw a chance by using an ATM network. Above all if great data capacity (sound- and video-information) must be transmitted by the application, it's necessary to have a network with a great bandwidth.

Implementation
The presently developed application MediaMaster is designed as a point of information for CD-shops. The customer is able to get information via a touch screen about the available audio-CD's of the shop. If he has chosen a title he can hear the sound and if an video is available he can see the video-clip.

Architecture
To reach the platform independence we have chosen JAVA as programming language. The
JAVA-applet of the MediaMaster, the GUI is totally based on the Java Development Kit
1.1.1 (JDK). With this approach we are sure that we can implement the SUN slogan 'write
once run everywhere'. The system is realized in a two tear client-server architecture.

On the server side we are using a http-server (Oracle Webserver, Apache, Netscape, ...) as Www-server and the Oracle Workgroup Database-Server as DBMS. In the database the whole information (50 MB) of the available CD's is stored. The multimedia files (18 GB) are stored in the file system. The server hardware is at the moment a SUN with a spark architecture and SUN Solaris 2.5.1 as operating system. Each database request runs as a stored procedure call on the Oracle database.

On the client side we need a JAVA enabled WWW browser and a platform running the JAVA Virtual machine (JVM). We are using the first implementation of the JAVA Media API framework in a beta version the Intel media player. The database connections take place with JAVA database connection (JDBC) of Oracle.

Deployment

The user must install the JDK 1.1.*, a JAVA enabled WWW browser and the Intel Media
Player. After reboot and invokation of the applet on the server he can use the MediaMaster.
A new release of the applet has only be installed on the server. At the next call all
customers are using the new program.

Scalability

The limits of the application are given by the performance of the WWW server (e.g. handling multiple requests) and its hardware. These hardware resources can be extended on demand. The scalability is restricted by the amount of available network capacity.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 95.0084-3