ACE/TAO/CIAO

ACE is an object-oriented framework that implements many core design patterns for concurrent communication software.

TAO is a standard-compliant implementation of CORBA that is designed for applications with high-performance and real-time requirements.

Overview of the ACE+TAO Project

Over the past decade, my research group has worked on many large-scale distributed application projects in diverse domains, including command and control systems, telecom, datacom, medical engineering, distributed interactive simulations, and financial services. Regardless of the domain and application requirements, we've found many software developers wrestling with the same core infrastructure challenges. Chief among these challenges include addressing OS platform portability, connection management and service initialization, event demultiplexing and event handler dispatching, multi-threading and synchronization, and fault detection and fault tolerance.

Unfortunately, it's very costly, time consuming, and error-prone for projects and companies to independently rediscover and reinvent ad hoc solutions to these core distributed application software development challenges. Fortunately, we have identified a relatively concise set of patterns and framework components that can be applied systematically to eliminate most of the tedious, error-prone, and non-portable aspects of developing and maintaining distributed applications. A decade of intense R&D on these topics has yielded ACE, which is an object-oriented framework that implements many core design patterns for concurrent communication software. We have applied the patterns and components in the ACE framework to develop The ACE ORB (TAO), which is our standards-based, CORBA middleware framework. TAO applies the best software practices and patterns that we have discovered in our work on ACE in order to automate the delivery of efficient, scalable, and predictable real-time quality-of-service (QoS) to distributed applications.

Both ACE and TAO are freely available, open-source software that have been funded by the DARPA Quorum program, NSF, and many visionary industrial sponsors.

It's important to recognize the extent to which TAO's open-source development model is responsible for its success. We're proud to have so many bright staff, students, and members of the ACE+TAO development community working with us over the years. As you work with TAO, please feel free to experiment with, dissect, repair, and improve it. We accept bug reports, appreciate bug fixes/enhancements, and strive to integrate correct bug fixes quickly using our online problem tracking system.