Como - Programming Interface, Implementation

Commlets have to implement the interface Commlet to receive information from other Commlet instances and to be started by a ComoClient. To send information to other commlet instances, they get a reference to a Communicator Object that provides methods like sendToAll() and ask().

Messages that can be sent must be instances of class Msg. A Msg can contain an object that stores the information that has to be sent. This object must either be one of a number of basic Java Objects, such as String, Integer, Hashtable, int[], etc. Or, it must implement the interface Saveable This part of the Como system could be very useful for other applets too-- something like that is missing in the Java API.

To make life easier, all our Commlets are derived from the class WindowCommlet that implemements the Commlet interface and does some useful work the derived classes don't have to worry about. Also, WindowCommlets can be built into MetaCommlets as plug-ins.

For every Commlet, there is a package under como/commlet that should contain all classes needed for that Commlet. Data files the Commlet needs are stored under como/commlets//. The ComObj provides methods to load files that reside in that directory or below.

Here is the complete javadoc documentation and the sources for the como system.

Currently, there are some small Limitations in the system.