AM2 Documentation
At the heart of AM2 is a scripting language called the Application Description Language (ADL). We conceived the ADL as the platform-independent storage format for AM2 application descriptions. Our original intention was to build a series of direct manipulation editors to assist users of all levels of programming experience in developing AthenaMuse applications. Only one such editor, a prototype layout editor, has been developed. Consequently, the ADL has also become the primary authoring medium for AM2 applications.
One reason for the ADL's effectiveness as a scripting language is that we designed it in concert with the internal C++ classes that regulate the AM2 environment. An AM2 application at run-time may be thought of as a collection of class instances that responds to user input like an automaton. The ADL is a very economical description of the classes that are used to build that automaton. The goal of this documentation is to explain how application developers can use the ADL to build the classes necessary to implement a particular multimedia application. Our intended audience are application developers. We assume some programming experience and familiarity with the general principles of object-oriented programming, but knowledge of C++ is not necessary to use the ADL. At times, however, in what follows, we will compare or contrast the ADL to C++ and Smalltalk to clarify its use to those familiar with these other object-oriented languages.
The AthenaMuse environment currently runs on three flavors of UNIX (SunOS 4.2.n, Solaris 2.5, and HPP-UX 9) as well as on Win95 and Windows/NT 3.5.1. A preliminary version of AthenaMuse runs on Macintosh System 7, but as of the date of this document, this version is not supported.
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