ACE Programmer's Guide, The: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming

Chapter 1. Introduction to ACE

ACE is a rich and powerful toolkit with a distinctively nontraditional history. To help you get a feel for where ACE comes from, this chapter gives a brief history of ACE's development. Before going into programming details, we cover some foundational concepts: class libraries, patterns, and frameworks. Then we cover one of ACE's less glamorous but equally useful aspects: its facilities for smoothing out the differences among operating systems, hardware architectures, C++ compilers, and C++ runtime support environments. It is important to understand these aspects of ACE before we dive into the rest of ACE's capabilities.

1.1 A History of ACE

ACE (the ADAPTIVE—A Dynamically Assembled Protocol Transformation, Integration, ...