The ACE ORB from the doc group 1.5.8

TAO project is a standards-compliant, real-time implementation of CORBA that provides efficient, predictable, and scalable quality of service (QoS) end-to-end.

Unlike conventional implementations of CORBA, which are inefficient, unpredictable, non-scalable, and often non-portable, TAO applies the best software practices and patterns to automate the delivery of high-performance and real-time QoS to distributed applications.

Over the past decade, my research group has worked with many collaborators on large-scale distributed application R&D 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, weve found that software developers wrestle with the same core infrastructure challenges. Key challenges focus on OS platform portability, connection management and service initialization, event demultiplexing and event handler dispatching, multi-threading and synchronization, fault detection and fault tolerance, and various quality-of-service (QoS) issues, such as controlling latency, throughput, and jitter end-to-end.

Unfortunately, its very costly, time consuming, and error-prone for researchers and developers 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 many 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 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 that allows clients to invoke operations on distributed objects without concern for object location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols and interconnects, and hardware. TAO is designed using the best software practices and patterns that we have discovered in our work on ACE in order to automate the delivery of high-performance and real-time QoS to distributed applications.