Narnia is middleware that helps programmers build multimedia communication services. This middleware uses a collection of familiar programming abstractions — including events, event handlers, resources, sessions, and user roles — to provide both a service development environment and a service execution environment. The run-time environment — the Narnia virtual machine — provides means for creating, transmitting, and consuming events as well as means for creating, loading, and executing sessions and event handlers.

The Narnia middleware has served as the development and execution platform for a few applications — including an audio/video chat application and a SIP proxy simulator. The paper reports on how well these applications handle various user request workloads. These early system performance measurements indicate the effectiveness of Narnia in supporting development and deployment of scalable network multimedia services.