Future Directions of ACE+TAO

Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, we have hired full-time staff members and graduate students to maintain, extend, and enhance ACE and TAO. In addition, ACE and TAO are supported commercially. Our future directions for ACE+TAO are summarized below:

Increased robustness -- ACE+TAO have become very stable, particularly on platforms that are supported commercially by Riverace and OCI. Our automated continuous build process is a cornerstone of ensuring that the quality of ACE+TAO continue to improve.
We are also enhancing TAO to support the forthcoming CORBA Fault Tolerance specification, which defines policies and mechanisms to ensure that client applications are largely insulated from management of redundant copies, failure masking, and recovery. We are working with partners at OCI and CMU to integrate TAO's ORB-level fault-tolerance features with higher-level services.
New features -- We are continually adding new features to ACE+TAO. In addition to the fault tolerance features outlined above, over the next year, we will complete our support for Lightweight CORBA Component Model (CCM) capabilities in the Component-Integrate ACE ORB (CIAO) that pertain to distributed real-time and embedded systems. We will also be adding support for the OMG's new Deployment and Configuration specification to our Component Synthesis via Model Integrated Computing (CoSMIC) toolsuite.
ACE+TAO subsetting -- We are currently subsetting ACE+TAO to make them more flexible, faster to compile, and to reduce their footprint for embedded systems. The results of our subsetting efforts are available online.
Additional optimizations -- We are continually applying optimizations to reduce unnecessary time and space overhead of ACE+TAO.
New platforms -- We plan to support more OS platforms in the future, particularly those related to real-time and embedded systems.
Improved documentation -- We continue to improve the online documentation for ACE and TAO. Fortunately, OCI is now offering a commercial-grade TAO Developer's Guide.
Better integration -- We are enhancing our support for portable CORBA programming with ACE+TAO. In particular, we are factoring out various utility components from TAO and making them available in ACE so they can be used by other ORBs, as well.

If you are interested in getting involved with ACE+TAO or can help sponsor work related to ACE+TAO, please contact Douglas C. Schmidt <d.schmidt@vanderbilt.edu>.

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Last modified 11:34:25 CDT 28 September 2006