WebHLA - An Interactive Multiplayer Environment for High Performance Distributed Modeling and Simulation

The process of integrating DoD Modeling and Simulation paradigms around the new HLA/RTI standards proceeds in parallel with the onset of new Object Web standards for distributed objects and componentware, emergent at the crossroads of CORBA, DCOM, Java, and XML based distributed object technologies. We describe here our WebHLA approach which integrates both trends by offering Object Web based implementation of the HLA framework. WebHLA follows a three-tier architecture including: a) Web / Commodity based interactive simulation authoring and runtime front-ends given by Java applets or DirectX multiplayers; b) software bus in the middleware, given by Object Web RTI i.e. our implementation of DMSO RTI 1.3 as a Java CORBA service managed by JWORB (Java Object Web Request Broker); c) domain specific backend simulation modules, including advanced high performance DoD simulation kernels such as ModSAF or SPEEDES. We describe here the overall design of WebHLA, we report on components prototyped so far and we summarize the status of the ongoing development of WebHLA applications