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In this paper, we compare the BERKOM globally accessible services project (GLASS) with the well-known WorldWide Web with respect to the ease of development, realization, and distribution of multimedia presentations. This comparison is based on the experiences we gained when implementing a gateway between GLASS and the WorldWide Web. Since both systems are shown to have obvious weaknesses, we are concluding this paper with a presentation of a better way to multimedia document engineering and distribution. This concept is based on a well-accepted approach to function-shipping in the Internet: the Java language, permitting for example a smooth integration of GLASS´ MHEG objects and WWW HTML pages within one common environment.

Distributed multimedia applications recently gain a large attraction to the multimedia industry. The MHEG (Multimedia Hypermedia Expert Group) is developing an open international standard for the exchange of multimedia presentations and their work has become quite advanced now. This paper describes the MHEG standard and its implementation in the GLASS project and presents an open authoring environment for distributed multimedia applications in the MHEG context. Our GLASS-Studio is an authoring environment employing the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) technique. The environment provides abstractions from the authoring domain and the underlying technical infrastructure of the GLASS system. GLASS-Studio supports rapid-prototyping and simulation capabilities, enabling an incremental and iterative design process. Real-world metaphors like direct manipulation and dragadrop provide an easy-to-learn user inter3ace. We present a flexible cooperation scheme based on the blackboard metaphor and show how guidance and assistance for the author can be incorporated. Finally we give an overview of the implementation concepts of GLASS-Studio.