Lumiera Architecture: Executive Summary
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:Author:	Hermann Voßeler
:Email:	<Ichthyostega@web.de>
:Date:      Sept 2010

//Menu: label Summary

.Three Layers
Besides the (obvious) separation in GUI frontend and render engine, editing core and application logic
are treated separately. Besides enforcing clearly defined interfaces, the ability for script driven
``headless'' operation and extensibility by plug-ins are deeply rooted in the overall design.

.Strong Separation
High-level and low-level realm remain cleanly separated, relying on a compiler-like translation mechanism.
This way, each part can be optimised for its purpose. The GUI exposes a feature-rich session model close
to the problem domain, while the engine operates on a performance optimised render nodes graph.

.Scheduling Micro Operations
High performance calculations in the engine are organised as micro tasks to be scheduled,
allowing for adaptation to current and future hardware, expected to operate increasingly parallelised.

.Intelligent IO
The engine is backed by an sophisticated frame cache and self adjusting I/O manager for maximising throughput
and bandwidth use.

.Stream Type System
Instead of relying on a single media framework, data streams are abstracted and classified, allowing to
handle most wiring, detection of possible connections and conversion automatically.

.Rules Based Configuration
Rather than driven by hard wired default behaviour or tedious manual operation, control flow is guided by
a set of rules shaped configuration, which scales better to large and complicated projects. Queries are
issued at decision points, allowing to build up a work environment customised and tailored for the needs
of specific projects.

