Understanding the Caucus framework

A caucus provides a way for clients to communicate in a multicast environment, where all clients receive all messages sent within the caucus.

The Caucus framework provides both a concrete standard interface and an abstract interface for caucus communication. The standard interface uses Message Streams as a transport, while the abstract interface operates independently of the networking mechanism. If you do not want to use Message Streams and if you have another multicast transport available to you, you can extend the framework to implement your own concrete interface.

Some of the features that the Caucus framework provides--such as join messages and the ability to pause and resume a caucus--are implemented for standard interface only. If you define your own concrete implementation of the abstract interface and want to use these features, you need to define the implementation.