Middleware support for distributed multimedia and collaborative computing

Maestro is a middleware support tool for distributed multimedia and collabo rative computing applications. These applications share a common need for m anaging multiple subgroups while providing possibly different quality-of-se rvice guarantees for each of these groups. Maestro's functionality maps wel l into these requirements, and can significantly shorten the development ti me of such applications. In this paper, we report on Maestro, and demonstra te its utility in implementing several multimedia and collaborative computi ng applications. In particular, we provide a detailed description of the im plementation of IMUX, a pseudo X-server (proxy) for collaborative computing applications that is based on Maestro, Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Son s, Ltd.