HP/Star Wars: Red Carpet Sound-Off

I was recently tasked with designing and building the back-end of an interactive installation. The back-end's role was to facilitate communication between the installation’s component pieces. My role also ended up spilling over into development of client applications.

The installation consisted of one controller application and one-hundred and twenty client applications, each playing a video from one of two sets. The installation had a short shelf-life, but it was important that while it was running no messages were dropped and that any one of the clients could pick up where it left off using the last message it should have received, if the client application crashed, the machine rebooted, etc.