The Adaptive Communication Environment (often referred to as ACE) is an open-source framework used to simplify various aspects of network programming. It provides a set of high performance object-oriented C++ classes designed to help address the inherent complexities and challenges in network programming by preventing common errors.[1]
Contents |
ACE was initially developed by Douglas C. Schmidt during his graduate work at the University of California, Irvine. Development followed him to the Washington University in St. Louis where he was employed. It was there in the Distributed Object Computer (DOC) group where ACE was released as open source. Today, most of the development work on ACE continues as part of the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University.[2]
ACE provides a standardized usage for operating system/machine specific features. It provides common data types and methods[3] to access the powerful but complex features of modern operating systems. These include: inter-process communication, thread management, efficient memory management, etc.
It was designed to be portable and provides a common framework. The same code will work on most Unixes, Microsoft Windows, VxWorks, QNX, OpenVMS etc, with minimal changes.[4] Due to this cross-platform support, it has been widely used in the development of communication software. Some of the successful projects that have used ACE includes: Motorola Iridium satellites, Boeing Wedgetail's Australian airborne early warning & control (AEW&C) system, and others.[5]
One of the unique features of ACE is the extensive use of design patterns in addressing the complexity of software. The ACE framework utilizes the following design patterns[6]:
Event handling patterns:
Synchronization patterns:
Concurrency patterns:
service access and configuration patterns: