MOCS: an object-oriented programming model for multimedia object communication and synchronization

This paper describes MOCS, an object-oriented programming model for multimedia object communication and synchronization. MOCS serves to hide the details of communication of various types of data over the network and synchronization of the playback of various data streams at the destination system through high-level programming support. In MOCS, the concept of mirror object is used to provide the application a consistent view of the objects in different systems. The concept of composite object is employed to encapsulate the synchronization of multiple data streams. A declarative approach to specify synchronization, which is easy to understand, is advocated. A mechanical way to transform a declarative synchronization specification to operational implementation is devised and implemented in SAMOCS (software architecture for MOCS), which provides application programming interface routines to let the programmer develop distributed multimedia programs more easily