Multimedia Knowledge Eclipse Environment: an Eclipse Tool for Multimedia System Development and Web Application Design

Paolo Maresca, Giuseppe Marco Scarfogliero and
Lorenzo Sorrentino
Università degli Studi di Napoli
Naples, Italy

In this paper, the authors discuss Multimedia Knowledge Eclipse Environment (MKEE), a multimedia application development environment based on TeleAction Objects, which combines the power of the multimedia language with the ease and pragmatism of eclipse in order to design Web applications. The environment is a set of tools that allows the application designer to describe all the aspects of a multimedia system based on TAO technology. It is adapted particularly to be used as a Web engineering tool. A multimedia Web application that has undergone an engineering process and has been organized as a TAO multimedia system can be described easily using MKEE's editors. These visual tools allow the definition of both hypermedia (static) structure, single objects and system behaviour (dynamic structure) named Index Cells. The final result of the multimedia application developed using MKEE is the description of its double structure (both static and dynamic) in a XML file, following the same ontology that rules TeleAction Objects language, and with all the good properties of the eXtensible Markup Language (i.e. portability, extensibility and reusability). The authors give a demonstration of how to use MKEE to build a distance learning system.