Jacco van Ossenbruggen
This is probably INS2's first commercially motivated blue note. Dick asked me to write up some CORBA/DOM buzzwords for GRiNS. So there is no real content yet, but if I have some new thoughts about the role of CORBA for GRINS, I'd like to put them here...
The most common --- and sometimes only --- way to use the services provided by an application is by using its graphical user interface (GUI). To also allow other applications to use these services, applications need to expose an application programming interface (API). Preferably, this API offers a high level interface that abstracts from low-level implementation details. To prevent that the application enforces the programming language it is implemented in onto other applications, this API needs to be specified in an language-neutral way. Additionally, it is extremely convenient if the two applications need not run on the same machine and platform, so the API needs to support platform independent communication over a network. The OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture provides an architecture for defining such APIs. On the Web, CORBA is currently used to provide a language independent definition of W3C's Document Object Model (DOM), the standard API to HTML and XML documents.
For GRiNS, having a CORBA interface will allow external applications to make use of the services provided by GRiNS. This allows, for example, Web browsers to remote-control the playback of SMIL documents by using Java applets. More advanced examples range from the dynamic generation and manipulation of multimedia presentations to delegation of part of the authoring process to third-party applications.
GRiNS' API will comply to the OMG Corba specifications and the Level 1 Core DOM for XML documents, as well as the future SMIL 2.0 DOM which is currently under development.
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