Abstract: | This paper sets out to explain the concepts behind the development of the Parlay API. The paper firstly describes the historical origins of the development, showing where the concepts initially began and describing some early work undertaken by the TINA Consortium on distributed software environments. The paper then goes on to describe the architecture upon which the Parlay API is built, to analyse the constituent parts of the API, particularly the call control element, and to give an overview of the ideas behind what has become known as Parlay X. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |