Achieving this potential requires the development of programming environments with integrated support for multimedia. SuiteSound is one such environment. SuiteSound is built in the Suite object-based system on a conventional UNIX operating system. SuiteSound is built in the Suite object-based system on a conventional UNIC operating system. SuiteSound objects incorporate multimedia by creating flows and filters.
Flows are streams of multimedia data moving through a sequence of objects.
They bridge the gap between objects resenting the state of an entity at a discrete point in time and space and continuous media such as live audio or video. Filters are intermediate objects between the source and destination of a flow. In effect, they provide a virtual device interface for the application programmer that is uniform and independent of any physical device. This paper describes the design and implementation of SuiteSound on the Sun voice annotator, and a software inspection tool. We perform experiments to determine the network and CPU load the sound tool, detail experiences using the SuiteSound environment and applications, give a retrospective of the difficulties and benefits of including multimedia in an object-based system, and suggest future work.