Ginga is the middleware adopted by the Brazilian Digital Television System (SBTVD) whose main functionalities are receiving and processing (in a transparent way in terms of software and hardware differences) the digital TV signal and providing specific services to declarative and imperative applications that run on the middleware. In the Ginga architecture, this set of common digital TV services is called Ginga-CC (Ginga Common Core), which is responsible for tuning channels in, exhibiting audio and video, and managing user preferences.

Some deficiencies present in the Ginga-CC original architecture have motivated the refactoring of this architecture in order to isolate crosscutting concerns and define an SPL-based architecture. This refactoring was made based on aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) and the SPL approach aiming to increase the configuration capability of Ginga through an automatic variability management. In this perspective, the GingaForAll SPL was generated by applying a domain engineering methodology in which common and variable features were identified from the application domain.

A brief description of the highlighted features:

The Tunner feature is responsible for selecting the physical channel used for signal transmission, which can be terrestrial (Terrestrial feature), satellite (Satellite feature) or over IP (IP feature), which has variants represented by the IPTV, InternetTV, and P2PTV features.

The Application Manager mandatory feature is responsible for loading, instantiating, configuring, and executing applications, besides controlling their lifecycle and managing resources and the access control.

The Media Processing mandatory feature manages the multimedia data processing and makes them available to other components of the middleware.

The Data Processing optional feature is responsible for accessing, processing, and providing data streams to other components of the middleware, besides notifying other components about application updates, synchronization, etc.

The Input Manager mandatory feature manages the input devices (e.g. remote control, keyboard, cellular, PDA, smartphone, etc.), thus requiring the selection of at least one of them.

The Return Channel optional feature refers to the technology that is used in the return channel for connection to the Internet.

Files:

GingaForAll SPL description (ProductLine element) using the LightPL-ACME ADL

Description of a system that adheres to the GingaForAll using the LightPL-ACME ADL