The programming, testing, and maintaining of Interactive Multimedia Applications (IMAs) are still difficult and expensive while substantial progress has been made in the last decade using interactive videodiscs combined with computer graphics and display technology. One of the reasons is that those who want to build IMAs are not skilled to program in conventional languages. Furthermore, the concurrency inherent in IMAs makes the problem more difficult. Although most existing tools provide users with visual programming facilities for the ease of programming, they are not enough to handle the concurrency of IMAs.
In this paper, we propose a visual programming environment, called Eventor(EVENT editOR), based on the formal specification mechanism of Milner's CCS for the fulfillment of describing concurrency inherent in complex IMAs, which is composed of three individual tools, a Temporal Synchronizer, a Spatial Synchronizer, and a User interaction Builder. This approach using the formal specification technique for the temporal synchronization makes clear the semantics of visual expressions written by programmers and it also makes the formal verifications and validations possible.
