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 Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1.
Project Background
In the recent years, the computer
and communication companies have made a great
effort to include communication capabilities
into workstations and desktops systems to enable
their employees to interact amongst each other
in order to achieve the company’s goal. This
lead to the development of real-time systems
that provide communication services, including
message exchange, filer transfer, and voice
conferencing. With these achievements, the
developed communication systems are widely
accepted as major functional means of
communication that have, in most cases, replaced
the typical telecommunication system.
To form a communication system, a
number of nodes must participate over a
distributed computing environment. In order to
realize a communication application, it is
essential to implement not only tools of
communication, but also a session control
mechanism. The session control mechanism must
offer capabilities for the control over
sessions, i.e. creating a session and adding and
removing users from a session. The tools that
assist the presentation of the application
include a shared communication session, private
communication sessions, file transfer sessions,
and audio conferencing sessions between the
participants.
1.2.
Introduction
In this report, the design and
the implementation issues of a communication
application are presented. The Interactive
Secure Communication, ISC, is a Java
communication system that offers various
real-time communication services to its users.
Within this chapter, the aims and objectives of
the report are presented along with a brief
highlight of its contents.
The Research Chapter introduces
the technologies that have been used to
implement the intended system.
The System Design Chapter
addresses the design phase that aims to
implement a suitable design for the intended
system within the requirements. A detailed
architecture of each of the system modules is
introduced showing how the system requirements
have been met.
The Implementation Chapter covers
the implementation phase that involves the
transformation of the system design into a
functional application. The chapter gives
detailed information on how each of the system
services is implemented. The implementation of
the system modules and the Graphical User
Interface (GUI) are also discussed within this
chapter. Furthermore, the chapter continues
covering the major problems that were
encountered and the modification occurred during
the implementation of the system.
The Testing Chapter includes the
test cases that were set to ensure the quality
and functionality of the each of the system
modules, including the services provided.
Finally, the Conclusion Chapter
summarises the problems encountered during the
development of the system. It also covers the
future enhancements that can be added to the
developed system to provide a better quality of
service.
1.3.
Aims and Objectives
The aim of the project is to
design and implement a real-time communication
system that provides its users with several
services, including: message exchange, file
transfer, and voice conferencing. The system is
to be implemented based on the client/server
model. Furthermore, the intended system contains
three primary modules that collaborate together
in order to provide the system services. These
modules are: the server module, the client
module, and the administrative module. The
intended system aims:
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