Introduction to Building n-Tier Architectures

As broadband technologies transform the Web into a conduit for rich media, the requirements for managing multimedia content necessitate system architectures suited to address the inherent challenges therein. This chapter focuses on the tips and techniques for using XML to architect reliable, scalable and cost-effective software engineering solutions for rich-media management.

Digital resources having value are herein referred to as digital assets, and multimedia content, including still photographs and streaming media types such as audio and video, are designated as rich-media.

Digital Asset Management Challenges

The challenges of managing rich-media are immense, encapsulating a myriad of data types whose size, behavior, and access methods widely vary. Building enterprise-class applications for managing digital assets, the initial challenge is providing a massively scalable architecture capable of administering content independent of its presentation characteristics, so it may be ubiquitously expressed and exchanged across disparate systems.

Presentation Challenges

Presentation characteristic handling often necessitates specialized visualization aids (such as renderers, viewers and players) be indexed to facilitate end-user personalization. Furthermore, there are bandwidth and transport implications as rich media can be difficult to transport over local or wide area network without degrading performance.

As such challenges as emerge in a distributed, company-wide, multi-tiered, rich-media management environment, they can be directly addressed using XML.