The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment An Object-Oriented Network Programming Toolkit for Developing Communication Software

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) is an object-oriented toolkit that implements strategic and tactical design patterns to simplify the development of concurrent, event-driven communication software. ACE provides a rich set of reusable C++ wrappers, class categories, and frameworks that perform common communication software tasks across a range of operating system platforms. The communication software tasks provided by ACE include event demultiplexing, event handler dispatching, connection establishment, interprocess communication, shared memory management, message routing, dynamic (re)configuration of network services, multi-threading, and concurrency control. ACE is targeted for developers of high-performance concurrent network applications and services. The primary goal of ACE is to simplify the development of concurrent OO communication software that utilizes interprocess communication, event demultiplexing, explicit dynamic linking, and concurrency. In addition, ACE automates communication software configuration and reconfiguration by dynamically linking services into applications at run-time and executing these services on one or more processes or threads. This paper describes the structure and functionality of ACE and presents several examples illustrating the core ACE features. ACE is freely available and is being used commercial products at Ericsson, Bellcore, Siemens, Motorola, and Kodak, as well as on many academic and industrial research projects. ACE has been ported to a variety of uni-processor and multi-process OS platforms includingWin32(i.e., WinNT and Win95), most versions of UNIX (e.g., SunOS 4.x and 5.x, SGI IRIX, HP-UX, OSF/1, AIX, Linux, and SCO), VxWorks, and MVS OpenEdition.