Towards a component model for universal data streams

Component technology is a modern instrument for software designers and engineers to create complex software applications in a rapid way. Much effort has been made to integrate audio and video streams into component applications. Today people realize that component technology promises a great value for distributed data stream processing applications beyond video conferencing. This paper presents the theoretical foundation for a specification and implementation framework for data-stream-enabled components. By means of the CORBA component model an enhanced meta-model for CORBA components that allows for the integration of universal data streams is presented and solutions for the functional extension of the CORBA component container as the runtime environment for data stream components is discussed. Design and implementation decisions with respect to an envisioned prototype close this paper.