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Multimedia Application Integration Architecture
(Last updated: Apr. 04, 2001)

What is the Multimedia Application Integration Architecture (MAIA)?

It's the name of an Open Design effort, formerly named MuCoS (the Multimedia Communication System), aimed at creating a new plugin and application integration standard for multimedia. The primary target platform is UN*X in general and Linux in particular, but as the APIs do not depend on UN*X specific system features, it will be easy to implement on other platforms, like Windows, MacOS or BeOS.

Why another standard?

We found that no existing standard is really up to what we want to do, on the technical level. Most of the industry standards cover only the plugin side of host/plugin systems -- there is no sufficient documentation regarding the implementation of fully compliant hosts.

The APIs we have investigated (that is, the ones we could get documentation on) are based on old designs, with roots in the early days of plugin technology, and they have been extended to reflect the state of the art to some extent. The result of this is that they are more complex and slower than necessary, while they still lack flexibility.

Beyond plugins . . .

While there are a few plugin interfaces, and some ways to interconnect applications, there is still no standard that supports both kinds of functionality in a consistent, clean and efficient way. There is no system that allows real integration of applications running in parallel, in real time.

MAIA will provide an API for client applications, that allow them to communicate through real time streams and time stamped events. This API even makes it possible to control plugins running inside another client´s engine! (That´s what plugins with custom GUI windows do; the GUIs are MAIA Clients, communicating with their respective plugins.) Any MAIA client may be used as a central engine to do all processing, or the processing can be distributed across multiple clients that stream to/from a central router/mixer server.

There will also be a plugin interface that´s very similar to the one for applications. The most important difference is that plugins run as callback functions, whereas clients can be applications, daemons or kernel modules.

This uniform design means that large parts of the interfaces can be reused -- less for the developer to learn and keep track of, and less code to debug and optimize. It also means that a lot of flexibility comes virtually for free. The idea is that there shouldn´t be a need to extend or modify the API to add features that should really be possible to "implement" on the user level, by hooking up applications and plugins in new ways. Like a file system with simple but powerful features, like pipes and links...

Of course, the option of running an application directly against the device drivers is still there. The plugin API can be used on it´s own to load and run MAIA plugins -- no special system components required to run the application.


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