Developing and Maintaining an Object-Oriented Distributed Multimedia Information System

As object-oriented analysis and design techniques mature, the promises of object-orientation become more realizable. The advent of multimedia hardware and software technology give rise to a need for generalized multimedia data access methods. This paper describes the object-oriented development and subsequent maintenance of ENFORMS, an object-oriented distributed multimedia information system. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using object-oriented analysis and design techniques to develop a general client–server architecture for browsing, retrieving, and analyzing distributed multimedia data. We also describe lessons learned from this project, including the impact of a rigorous application of object-oriented analysis and design techniques.