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Abstract

In this project writeup, I introduce taktile, a C++ client library designed to facilitate seamless data sharing with Team Awareness Kit (TAK) network participants. Inspired by the popular pytak Python library, taktile provides a native, high-performance alternative for C++ developers working on tactical or situational awareness applications. By leveraging a modular architecture built on simpleio, taktile simplifies the complexities of TAK protocols (V0 and V1) while offering a robust, asynchronous runtime environment.

Why taktile?

For many developers in the TAK ecosystem, pytak is the de facto standard for rapid integration. However, as projects scale or move toward resource-constrained embedded environments, the need for a native C++ solution becomes apparent. I have personally worked on several projects where this was the case. I developed taktile to bridge this gap, ensuring that C++ developers have access to the same functionality and simplified workflow found in Python without sacrificing performance.

The core value proposition of taktile is simplicity:

• Runtime Context Management: Users create a single context manager to handle the asynchronous lifecycle for their application. The context manager ensures safe execution of concurrently running tasks.

• Plug-and-Play Senders/Receivers: Easily register handlers for different TAK message types (XML-based V0 or Protobuf-based V1).
• Protocol Versatility: Full support for UDP, TCP, and TLS network protocols, including examples for complex configurations like encrypted streaming.

Architectural Design Paradigms

To ensure taktile remains maintainable and extensible, I adhered to several key software design patterns during development.

Separation of Concerns: simpleio owns the abstractions for message serialization and transport

taktile is built on top of simpleio, a library I created to standardize the “Define-Serialize-Transport” pattern. By separating the concerns of serialization, packet framing, and transport, taktile can swap out a UDP transport for a TLS-encrypted TCP stream without changing the high-level message logic. Moreover, simpleio can be reused independently of taktile for other application layer networking protocols (e.g., HTTP, DASH, or HLS).

Design Patterns for Modularity

• Factory Pattern: I used factories to instantiate Message, Sender, and Receiver implementations. This allows the library to support new network protocols or transport layers with minimal impact on the user-facing API.
• Pimpl (Pointer to Implementation): By using the Pimpl idiom, I’ve achieved clean dependency injection and a sharp separation between the public interface and the underlying implementation. This keeps the public headers lightweight and minimizes recompilation times.

Asynchronous Foundations with Boost.Asio

Performance in taktile is driven by a fully asynchronous context management paradigm that uses Boost.Asio in its implementation. Moving away from synchronous I/O was a significant learning curve, particularly in managing the lifecycle of network connections.

I learned a lot about asynchronous programming by going through this exercise. I now see the power of non-blocking workflows and how to use software libraries like Boost to implement them. It is amazing to me the increase in efficiency that I observed after going fully asynchronous.

Production-Ready CI/CD Pipeline

To maintain project integrity, taktile utilizes a sophisticated GitHub Actions pipeline that automates the entire development lifecycle.

Simplified Developer Experience

taktile (and simpleio) utilize a Linux devcontainer within VS Code for a standard and simplified developer experience. Developers can get started with either of these projects quickly. They can be making and testing changes in less than 10 minutes, in most cases. All of the standard steps described above (e.g., build, test, and analyze) are automated by scripts under source control in the repositories and these scripts are encapsulated as VS Code tasks for a fully integrated IDE experience.

Concluding Remarks

Building taktile and its foundation, simpleio, has been an exercise in refining my approach to asynchronous C++ and modular library design. While the library is currently in its MVP stage, it already provides a viable path for C++ applications to create participants in TAK networks with minimal boilerplate. My hope is that this project lowers the barrier to entry for developers who need the performance of C++ but the ease of use of high-level Python libraries.

Thanks for reading!