Tutorials : Add Rich Media Content to Your J2EE Apps with Enterprise Media Beans :

Add Rich Media Content to Your J2EE Apps with Enterprise Media Beans

The internet has evolved from a dispenser of static HTML content to a dynamic media capable of beaming live and streaming media—including high definition movies. Customers today demand animated images, interactive movies, high quality sound videos, and much more. Hundreds of media streamers, mixers, and recorders are in the market to capitalize on this demand and provide high quality media content to the users. But the downside of this rapid growth is the lack of any standards for these devices and numerous media formats in the market. You've got numerous streamers and recorders that run on proprietary media formats many of which are not interoperable with each other.

A few major players dominate the media streaming domain with their proprietary media formats. Amongst the more popular are Real Networks (RealSystem), Apple (QuickTime), Microsoft (Windows Media Player), and Nullsoft (WinAmp). All these systems work on different data formats and also require a proprietary player to reproduce the media data. As the demand for media content increases on the internet, these major players are trying to exert their own pressures and push their respective formats as standards into the market. The biggest loser in this trend is the end customer, who ends up with numerous media players on his computer, one for each type of format. Most of us at least have two media players on our computer.

The EMB specification proposes a simple and lightweight media framework that can integrate rich media content with J2EE applications. This specification does not propose a design for a new media player or a Java-based media playback system. The specification defines how rich media can be used in business applications by embedding business logic into media components.

Architecture

The basic premise of Enterprise Media Beans is to provide rich media content to Enterprise applications using the J2EE programming model. Most J2EE applications conform to two basic paradigms of development. The first one involves use of the basic Java Programming language to creating building blocks, which are in turn used to build larger applications; the second involves using Enterprise Java Bean Technology to create applications.

The first approach uses disparate Java technologies like JDBC, JMS, JTS, etc. to create atomic components and then serves them up to the user through Java server pages and servlets. In this approach, the responsibility of managing the container, managing connections, and taking care of transactions rests on the atomic components.

The second approach using Enterprise Java Beans eliminates the responsibility of managing connections and transactions from the end-user and puts it on the EJB framework.

This article doesn't discuss the merits of either approach. The Enterprise Media beans architecture supports both approaches and leaves the responsibility of choosing the right approach to the system architect.

The Enterprise Media Beans Architecture provides two types of beans to support the aforementioned approaches. The first type is the Media Foundation Bean, which uses the basic J2EE framework to provide media content. The second is the Media Entity Bean, which uses the EJB architecture to provide media content. Internally, the Media Content Beans use the Media Foundation Beans to do their operations.

Media Foundation Beans

The Media Foundation Beans provide basic definitions for media related services using the basic J2EE programming model. The services are provided for media objects that are local, transient, and immutable. Some of the important features of the Media Foundation beans are:

The ability to extract external links to other media resources through links in non-embedded objects.
The ability to extract header information about the included media.
Converting media objects from one format to another.
Providing services that help integrate rich media into Java applications.

The ability to extract header information about the media can reduce the overhead applications incur when operating in multiple platforms. Without the header information, applications have to program separately for each platform. Headers can help to retrieve information about media objects on the fly instead of relying on a database to hold the information. Media headers contain information like the length of the media file, sampling rate of the media file, etc. Java applications extract this information out of the header and display it to the user instead of accessing the information from databases or configuration files.

Media foundation Beans provide for the conversion of media objects from one format to another so that programming for specific platforms can be avoided. This is of great use when applications need to convert one media object to another format to suit some specific client need. A good example is when a servlet needs to format the media object to meet size requirements on the client platform.

Media Converters are provided within the Media Foundation Beans framework as plug-in components. This allows third party vendors to create media converters that can be plugged within any implementation of Media Foundation Beans. The reference implementation accompanying this specification contains media converters for standard media formats like JPEG, BMP, WAV, and MPEG, etc. Apart from these, other media formats are supported generically.

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