Programming

Programming
Implementing collaborative applications usually consists of:

Picking an existing application and deciding which functionality shall be shared;

Designing message based protocol for sharing information essential to collaboration;

Adding ‘send’ and ‘receive’ procedures to support message passing in the designed protocol.

The first step is essential as it determines the functionality of a shared application. Decisions made at this stage are independent from Tango.

Subsequently, a protocol must be devised, which is to operate on the reliable message passing mechanism provided by Tango. Issues of application initialization and maintaining coherent state across application instances should be addressed here. Session owner or the first session master can be used as a session-long state reference. Certain optimization issues such as amount and compression of data exchanged or number of messages versus message size tradeoff should be considered at this stage.

Lastly and most easily, sending and receiving procedures should be coded using Tango API to implement the designed protocol.