Flexible Event-Based Threading for QoS-Supporting Middleware

Distributed computing platforms have made their way out of the research lab nowadays, yet support for some key application areas such as real time in general and multimedia in particular is still found lacking. Since a single platform is unlikely to be able to satisfy the widely diverse requirements of such QoS-sensitive application domains, we propose a low-level foundation called COOL JAZZ instead, which is designed for easy customisation and on which more specific middleware platforms for distributed heterogeneous environments with QoS-requirements can be built. COOL JAZZ combines support for concurrency, communication, and signal handling within a unified event-based processing model inspired by SDL. In this paper we outline the overall architecture of COOL JAZZ and present the concurrency mechanisms in detail