jMinim

1 Introduction

jMinim is a general-purpose lightweight framework for Java components. It's currently being used to develop components for digital audio applications. The name jMinim was chosen because of its musical connection and also to suggest that software components built using jMinim are some sense "minimal".

The latter aspect deserves some further explanation. It doesn't imply that jMinim components have minimum standards of capability or quality, or that there are things missing from them that should really have been included. Instead, it means that jMinim follows a "less is more" design philosophy where simplicity is preferred over complexity. For example, a feature is added only if it provides useful capability that can't reasonably be achieved using existing features, and if the feature is easy to explain and understand.

The jMinim framework is being used to develop components used by the following applications:

MinimServer is a network music server.

MinimPlayer (work in progress) is a network music player.

MinimControl (work in progress) is a network control point that selects a list of music tracks from a network music server and plays these tracks on a network music player.

These components can be used together or they can be used with other components or devices that support the UPnP AV or OpenHome standards.

My intention is to release the jMinim framework as open source when I can find time to create the necessary documentation.

More later....