DejaVu -- a component-based approach to hypermedia

Jacco van Ossenbruggen & Anton Eliëns
Vrije Universiteit, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science,
De Boelelaan 1081, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
email: jrvosse@cs.vu.nl eliens@cs.vu.nl, fax: +31.20.4447653
www.cs.vu.nl/~jrvosse/ www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/

abstract

Object-technology offers promising means to cope with the problems that occur when developing complex programs. The DejaVu project employs an object-oriented approach to formulate a framework for the development of distributed, intelligent hypermedia systems. The result of our efforts is a collection of libraries and tools providing the functionality needed for developing hypermedia applications and multimedia user interfaces. In this paper an overview is given of the components constituting the DejaVu framework, that is the hush (hyper utility shell) library and its extensions, offering a variety of GUI widgets, basic hypertext facilities, support for discrete event simulation, facilities for sound synthesis and high level music description languages, digital video and a connection to the World Wide Web. As an example, we will show how to extend our web browser to allow for embedding a discrete event simulation program in a collection of web pages. Also, we will discuss some issues of the design and implementation of our framework. Finally, we will briefly summarize the lessons learned and indicate the direction of our future research.
Postscript
eliens@cs.vu.nl
Wed Oct 23 21:43:40 CEST 2013