This is a general guide to getting elvin4 up and running on a Unix-like platform. I don't know much about windows anymore, so you'll have to look elsewhere for how to setup elvin on that platform. Some basic Unix knowledge is expected, but not too much. Clients establish sessions with an Elvin server process and are then able to send notifications for delivery or register to receive notifications sent by others.
Clients can act as both producers and consumers of information within the same session.
This means we need to set up a server and find some clients. The server is easy and the C client library includes some command line clients which we will use to test the server is set up. Elvin4 has a number of other client libraries to make it easy to write applications, so we could install one or more of them. At the end of this guide, we will walk though some example code just to prove writing Elvin clients is a doddle. If you want to run your own server or build your own C clients, you'll need the elvin4 support libraries.