A comparison of two object oriented application development platforms for multimedia services to the Internet

The Internet has gathered a great deal of interest in the last few years. Companies are continuously building Web sites in order to communicate with their customers. The next-generation Web must be able to deal with the complex requirements of multi-step, business-to-business and consumer-to-business transactions. In this paper, a complete scenario for the provision of interactive multimedia services over the Internet is considered, exploiting alternative emerging software methodologies that implement different aspects of what is called the Object Web. The concept of the Object Web resulted from efforts to integrate object-oriented technologies and the Internet. This integration facilitates the development of demanding Internet applications requiring highly interactive services. First, Web application design considerations over the years are presented, in parallel to the evolution of the World Wide Web. Then the study focuses on a distributed multimedia application named Kids' TV Mine, which has been developed under the INFO2000 umbrella of European research projects. The developed system aims at delivering, over the Internet, information on children's TV programmes and co-productions, including short video extracts. Two different implementation models are described: the HTTP/Microsoft Active Server Pages approach and the Java/CORBA approach. Finally, experimental results comparing the two implementation models are presented and the advantages gained from the latter one are highlighted.