To initialize replication, ex_rep_base creates a Berkeley DB environment and calls to establish a send function. (See the main function in , including its calls to the create_env and env_init functions in .)

Once the initial threads have all been started and the communications infrastructure is initialized, the application signals that it is ready for replication and joins a replication group by calling DB_ENV->rep_start(). (Again, see the main function in .)

The final piece of a replicated application is the code that loops, receives, and processes messages from a given remote environment. ex_rep_base runs one of these loops in a parallel thread for each socket connection (see the hm_loop function in ). Other applications may want to queue messages somehow and process them asynchronously, or select() on a number of sockets and either look up the correct environment ID for each or encapsulate the ID in the communications protocol.