Avango 1.0.1 review

Data distribution is achieved by transparent replication of a shared scene graph among the participating processes of a distributed a

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Jurgen Wind

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Data distribution is achieved by transparent replication of a shared scene graph among the participating processes of a distributed application.

A sophisticated group communication system is used to guarantee state consistency even in the presence of late joining and leaving processes. The familiar dataflow graph found in modern stand-alone 3D-application toolkits extends nicely to the distributed case.

Many toolkits for the development of stand-alone VE applications exist today. They provide the programmer with a high-level interface to represent complex geometry in a scene graph and to render that scene graph. The programmer is shielded from the details of dealing with low-level graphics and system APIs, and can concentrate on the development of the application itself.

AVANGO provides programmers with the concept of a shared scene-graph, accessible from all processes forming a distributed application. Each process owns a local copy of the scene graph and the contained state information, which is kept synchronized.

Our object-oriented framework allows the creation of application specific classes, which inherit these distribution properties. Furthermore, the shared scene-graph is augmented with a distributed dataflow graph. This provides the same evaluation characteristics in distributed applications as in stand-alone applications, and effectively supports the development of distributed interactive applications.

In contrast to similar systems like Repo-3D (MacIntyre:1998) we focus on high-end, real-time, virtual environments like CAVEs (Cruz-Neira:1993:SSP) and Workbenches (HKP:Krueger94,HKP:Krueger95), therefore the development is based on SGI Performer (Rohlf:1994:IPH).

With AVANGO, we provide a framework that combines the familiar programming model of existing stand-alone toolkits with built-in support for data distribution that is almost transparent to the application developer.

What's New in This Release:
This is a minor bugfix release which fixes some small but nasty bugs in the system.
It should be source code compatible with 1.0.0.
Main development continues on CVS HEAD, which will not be compatible with 1.0.0.