maci is a distributed application, that allows to manage, transmit and store data, such as audio- or videostreams. maci makes no limitations to the format of the data to manage, it can be binary executable data, a videostream or a html-page. out of this reason maci can be considered as a content-management-system. one basic concept of maci is the unique identification of every data(block). this is reached by the calculation of hash-values from the data. the algorithm is not specified but should be efficient and resistent against little changes in the data (such as cutting some seconds from an audio-file). maci consists of three basic components, an application-server, a streaming-server and a client. the client is a web-interface but on top of macis open interfaces, developers can build their own user-intefaces. for extended features such as rendering media-data and capturing maci uses applets and java-webstart-applications. the application-server JBOSS bundles the streaming-server the data-logic (ejb) and the presentation-layer. as presentation platform maci uses cocoon, a java servlet that converts plain xml content via stylesheets into every wanted format, in this case into html-pages. with this techology developers are able to build completely new user-interfaces and/or change the web-interface into various designs. the streaming-server is a java-application that relays and stores live-data. the relay of data uses the java object serialization protocol, so that every format can be transmitted by putting the data simply in a serializable object. to work in commercial systems maci provides a permission-based licensing system. this means that every data(block) has exactly one owner. this owner owns the root-permission of this "file" and is able to give other users a (limited) permission of this file. permissions can limit the number of downloads and/or forbid the download after a specified date. maci can be used as videoconferencing system, video-on-demand platform, online-operation-(file)system, security-watch system, babyfon, instant-messaging platform, mobile video messaging platform, distance learning platform and many more.
