Object middleware company Iona Technologies Ltd, currently holding its Iona World Conference 98 in Boston, Massachusetts, has made its promised move into multimedia by adding multimedia support to its Orbix object request broker with OrbixMX 1.0. Iona has its eye on the possibilities of Corba-based distributed applications for industry sectors such as telecommunications, finance, medicine and aerospace, where there is an increasing requirement for multimedia interoperability for applications such as video conferencing, entertainment, bio-medical, high bandwidth instrumentation and the bulk transfer of typed and untyped data. In these sectors, Iona says, there are many diverging technologies and very little infrastructure to glue them together. Arising out of Iona’s Art project (CI No 3,255), OrbixMX 1.0 adds functionality to Orbix such as real-time support, multimedia streams, Corba Trader and Naming services implementations and multiple ORB transport support. A MediaStreams component is an implementation of the Corba A/V Streams specification for managing and controlling audio-visual streams, which Iona co-authored last year with Lucent Technologies Inc and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes AG. This enables streams set up, control and termination, and support for both multi-point and uni-point communications. OrbixMX has also been made asynchronous transfer mode aware, so that developers can use ATM’s Quality of Service settings from the application development layer, using the new Orbix ATM InterORB Protocol, AIOP. Bi-directional support for the IIOP Internet InterORB Protocol, combined with a low-footprint IIOP Engine, ties in the new generation of consumer devices into OrbixMX-based integrated systems. OrbixMX should be available in the third quarter of the year. á
