COMPUTING SEMINAR

*** PLEASE NOTE UNUSUAL DAY, TIME, DURATION, AND PLACE ***

ABSTRACT

1 Topic
The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) is a C++ toolkit for object oriented network programming that has been developed at the Washington University of St.Louis, MI, USA by Douglas C. Schmidt. Since the early days, it addresses high performance environments, such as medical imaging, avionics and telecommunication applications. ACE incorporates an operating system abstraction layer that facilitates porting of applications to different platforms (several UNIX flavours, WindowsNT, LynxOS and VxWorks to name but a few). On top of this layer design patterns that are common to network aware applications have been implemented. ACE contains also a real-time CORBA implementation named TAO.
More information on ACE is available through the web http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html

2 Scope
The goal of this tutorial is to present the building blocks of the ACE toolkit. Some patterns are highlighted, namely the streams facility, the reactor, the service configurator, and the active object. Simple examples are presented in order to illustrate the application of object oriented programming in distributed systems. The upper level frameworks, such as TAO will only be mentioned shortly by outlining their capabilities and application areas.

3 Duration
Two Hours (break included) 4 Background Knowledge Attendees should have a basic knowledge of object oriented programming. As the toolkit aims at hiding complicated low level information from the application programmer, it is not required to have detailed knowledge about network protocols or operating system details.