Middleware support for distributed multimedia and collaborative computing

Maestro is a middleware support tool for distributed multimedia and collaborative computing applications. These applications share a common need for managing multiple subgroups while providing possibly different quality-of-service guarantees for each of these groups. Maestro's functionality maps well into these requirements, and can significantly shorten the development time of such applications. In this paper, we report on Maestro, and demonstrate its utility in implementing several multimedia and collaborative computing applications. In particular, we provide a detailed description of the implementation of IMUX, a pseudo X-server (proxy) for collaborative computing applications that is based on Maestro.