Product Description

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) is an open-source toolkit for building high-performance networked applications and next-generation middleware. ACE's power and flexibility arise from object-oriented frameworks, used to achieve the systematic reuse of networked application software. ACE frameworks handle common network programming tasks and can be customized using C++ language features to produce complete distributed applications. This book will teach developers how they can use the ACE framework to develop their software. It will also show real-world uses of design patterns and C++. Benefits: Reduces the ACE learning curve, gain a clear understanding of how to use ACE to produce high-performance software using less time and effort; Provides a cookbook for solutions to common software engineering problems.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #675661 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

From the Back Cover

If you're designing software and systems that must be portable, flexible, extensible, predictable, reliable, and affordable, this book and the ACE toolkit will enable you to be more effective in all of these areas. Even after spending over a decade developing ACE and using it to build networked software applications, I find that I've learned a great deal from this book, and I'm confident that you will, too.
--Douglas C. Schmidt, Inventor of ACE, from the Foreword

This book is a must-have for every ACE programmer. For the beginner, it explains step-by-step how to start using ACE. For the more experienced programmer, it explains in detail the features used daily, and is a perfect reference manual. It would have saved me a lot of time if this book had been available some years ago!
--Johnny Willemsen, Senior Software Engineer, Remedy IT, The Netherlands

With a large C++ code base, we rely on ACE to enable a cross-platform client-server framework for data quality and data integration. ACE has improved our design and smoothed over OS idiosyncrasies without sacrificing performance or flexibility. The combination of online reference materials and printed "big picture" guides is indispensable for us, and The ACE Programmer's Guide earns top-shelf status in my office.
--John Lilley, Chief Scientist, DataLever Corporation

In SITA air-ground division, we are one of the major suppliers of communication services to the airline industry. We started using ACE about a year ago and are now moving most of our new communication-related development to it. I can say that using this toolkit can reduce the development and testing time by at least 50% in our type of application.
--Jean Millo, Senior Architect, SITA

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) is an open-source software toolkit created to solve network programming challenges. Written in C++, with the help of 30 core developers and 1,700 contributors, this portable middleware has evolved to encapsulate and augment a wide range of native OS capabilities essential to support performance-driven software systems.

The ACE Programmer's Guide is a practical, hands-on guide to ACE for C++ programmers building networked applications and next-generation middleware. The book first introduces ACE to beginners. It then explains how you can tap design patterns, frameworks, and ACE to produce effective, easily maintained software systems with less time and effort. The book features discussions of programming aids, interprocess communication (IPC) issues, process and thread management, shared memory, the ACE Service Configurator framework, timer management classes, the ACE Naming Service, and more.

The accompanying CD-ROM contains the complete ACE toolkit, including installable kits for Windows, Solaris, and HP-UX; complete reference documentation for all of the ACE classes; and source code for every example in the book.

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About the Author

Stephen D. Huston is President and CEO of Riverace Corporation, a provider of technical support and consulting services to companies who want to keep software projects on track using ACE. Steve has nearly ten years of experience with ACE, and more than twenty years of software development experience, focusing on network protocol and C++ networked application development in a wide range of hardware and software environments.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ACE (the ADAPTIVE Communication Environment) is a powerful C++ toolkit that helps you develop portable, high-performance applications, especially networked and/or multithreaded applications, more easily and more quickly with more flexibility and fewer errors. And, because of ACE's design and frameworks, you can do all this with much less code than with other development approaches. We've been using ACE for years and have found it exceedingly helpful and well worth any price. What's better is that it's available for free! The historical price many developers have paid to use ACE is a steep learning curve. It's a big toolkit with a large set of capabilities. Until recently, the best documentation has been the source code, which is, of course, freely available, and a set of academic papers born of the research that produced ACE, approachable only by advanced professionals and upper-level students. This barrier to learning has kept ACE's power and easy-to-use elegance one of the best-kept secrets in software development. That's why we're very excited to write this book! It flattens out ACE's learning curve, bringing ACE's power, elegance, and capabilities to all.

This book teaches you about ACE: a bit of its history and approach to development, how it's organized, how to begin using it, and also how to use some of its more advanced capabilities. We teach you how to do things the ACE way in this book, but we could not possibly fit in a complete reference. Use this book to get started with ACE and to begin using it in your work. If you've been using ACE for a while, there are probably descriptions of some capabilities you haven't seen before, so the book is useful for experienced ACE users as well.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is meant to serve as both an introductory guide for ACE beginners and a quickly accessible review for experienced ACE users. If you are an ACE beginner, we recommend starting at the beginning and proceeding through the chapters in order. If you are experienced and know what you want to read about, you can quickly find that part of the book and do not need to read the previous sections.

This book is written for C++ programmers who have been exposed to some of the more advanced C++ features, such as virtual inheritance and class templates. You should also have been exposed to basic operating system facilities you plan to use in your work. For example, if you plan to write programs that use TCP/IP sockets, you should at least be familiar with the general way sockets are created, connections are established, and data is transferred.

This book is also an excellent source of material for those who teach others: in either a commercial or an academic setting. ACE is an excellent example of how to design object-oriented software and use C++ to design and write high-performance, easily maintained software systems.

Organization

This book is a hands-on, how-to guide to using ACE effectively. The many source code examples illustrate proper use of the pieces of ACE being described. The source code examples are kept fairly short and to the point. Sometimes, the example source is abridged in order to focus attention on a topic. The complete source code to all examples is on the included CD-ROM and is also available on Riverace Corporation's web site. The included CD-ROM also includes a copy of ACE's source kit, installable versions of ACE prebuilt for a number of popular platforms, and complete reference documentation for all the classes in ACE.

The book begins with basic areas of functionality that many ACE users need and then proceeds to build on the foundations, describing the higher-level features that abstract behavior out into powerful patterns.

Part I introduces ACE and provides some generally useful information about the facilities ACE provides. Part I also explains how to configure and build ACE, as well as how to build your applications that use ACE. Widely used programming aids, such as logging and tracing, command line processing and configuration access, and ACE's container classes, are also described.

Part II discusses ACE's facilities for interprocess communication (IPC), beginning with basic, low-level TCP/IP Sockets wrapper classes and proceeding to show how to handle multiple sockets, as well as other events, such as timers and signals, simultaneously using ACE's Reactor and Proactor frameworks. Part II also describes ACE's Acceptor-Connector framework and then ends with a discussion of some of the other IPC wrapper classes ACE offers, many of which are substitutable for TCP/IP wrapper classes in the covered frameworks.

Part III covers a wide range of topics related to process and thread management using ACE. This part explains how to use ACE's process management classes and then covers signals, followed by three chapters about multithreaded programming, thread management, and the critical areas of thread safety and synchronization. Part III ends with discussions of Active Objects and various ways to use thread pools in ACE--critical topics for effective use of multithreading in high-performance applications.

Part IV covers advanced ACE topics: shared memory, the ACE Streams framework for assembling modular data-processing streams, and how to make your applications more flexible and configurable by using the ACE Service Configurator framework. Part IV concludes with an in-depth discussion of ACE's timer management classes and the ACE Naming Service, one of ACE's network services components to assist with often needed networked application programming tasks.

The book concludes with a bibliography and an extensive subject index.

Conventions Used in This Book

All ACE classes begin with ACE_. When we refer to patterns instead of the classes they implement, we omit the prefix. For example, the Reactor pattern is implemented by the ACE_Reactor class.

All class member variables are suffixed with '_'. This convention is used in the ACE sources, and we carry it through to the examples in this book as well.

C++ code and file names are set in this font. Command lines are set in this font.

Steve Huston
James CE Johnson
Umar Syyid

0201699710P11042003

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Customer Reviews

Just awful
ACE is great, no doubt. This book is not. If I had been scanning ACE code for years and needed a reference, this book might be great, but like a kid in a foreign land, this book only confused me more than it helped. Here's why:

READS LIKE AN UNABRIDGED NOVEL. In order to understand each example, you must read the book from cover to cover. There is so much detail in ACE that there are almost no "trivial examples" and a thorough understanding is required. What if I'm not writing a high-performance server application? What if I want to work with small examples and work my way up incrementally? This book makes it difficult to do that.

EXAMPLE CODE IS CHOPPY. Each example is presented in such a way that code is provided piecemeal, along with paragraphs of explanation. This is ok, but it is very difficult to piece the examples together and write code. Also, it's not listed in the book, but the examples are online, here:

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE_wrappers/examples/APG/

This link is not in the book.

THIS BOOK JUMPS EVERYWHERE. For instance, check out section 7.5, Timers. We're given a quick intro on Timers while we're kneed deep in talking about the omniscient Reactor that ACE provides. Now, section 8.5 talks briefly about timers and to reference further documentation in reference to Reactor/Proactor, which is unhelpful and unnecessary. Finally, section 10 gives great detail into using Timers. Chapter 7 should have been called Reactor.

My biggest interest was writing a client/server application in ACE. Chapter 6 started with a terrible example of socket communication, saying that Chapter 7 is a better pattern for the client/server. By the time I got done with Chapter 7, there was so much rambling of hypothetical situations that I completely forgot what I was trying to learn. The big picture is often lost.

NO API REFERENCE. Maybe it is not appropriate to put in an ACE API reference in here. I think it should be put in as an appendix. When examples are presented, the new data types come out of nowhere. What is an ACE_Time_Value, specifically? What other parameters can it provide? ACE Doxygen documents can't provide enough detail and neither can this book.

What I would love to see in a second edition:
- More descriptions of the standard types.
- Description of ACE_TMain and other OS functions.
- A better mapping of types to GOF patterns and better UML.
- An API reference, even if it is small
- Table mapping Unix/Windows/VxWorks functions to ACE functions.
- A more readible text. The code blocks could be encapsulated in gray to take it out of the text somewhat.

Also, most of the other reviews on this book shown above talk about how great ACE is for development, and I agree. However, isn't this the section where we are supposed to be commenting on the BOOK (APG) and not the TECHNOLOGY? These reviews hardly talk about the book at all!

Huston, et al, I encourage you to come out with a second edition. I still want to learn about ACE, but I need a more organized reference and clearer examples.

Great way to learn the ACE Framework
This is probably the most practical book ever written on this topic. I have read the C++ Network Programming books, and I believe that this Programmer's Guide is even better.

ACE, the ADAPTIVE Communication Environment, has been around since the early 90's and thanks to over 1700 contributors over the past decade or so, it has become a very powerful, reusable, Object Oriented, beautifully engineered, designed, and developed framework that is creeping its way to the hearts of developers, project leads, and managers all around the world and in many industry verticals.

ACE has made one of the hardest things to do as a developer, network programming much simpler, but that's not all. That's where this book comes into play. The other books focus on the network programming of ACE, and even though they cover the topic VERY well, they don't convey the other powerful features that ACE has:
ACE Logging Facility
ACE Runtime and configuration facility
ACE (STL like) containers, allocators, etc...

Right of the bat, this book covers those details and shows the reader concrete examples and ways to apply these examples in real life.
The author spends the next 4 chapters (6-9) going over the IPC facilities of ACE. It starts from basic SOCKET programming, to SIGNALS, to the use of TIMERS and it ends with the odds and ends of IPC. These topics were covered in the C++ network programming books before, but this book, instead of talking about it, SHOWS the reader how things are done. The Reactor and the Proactor frameworks are covered in chapters 7 and 8. As the author mentions in chap 7:
The ACE reactor framework was designed to implement a flexible event-handling mechanism is such a way that applications need never write the central, platform-dependent code for their event-handling needs.
Then the author goes into an extensive detail of how this is done, and in its closing remarks, he says the following:
With little ingenuity, your reactor-based application can turn on the foyer light when someone pulls into your driveway or mute the television when the phone rings.
The Proactor framework is covered in full detail in the following chapter. The author does a great job at telling and showing the differences between the two design patterns and when to use one vs. the other. When all said and done, the author explains how these two design patterns can make a killer combo.
The book is more like a personal notebook that you would create for yourself in that you write down notes, hints, do's and don'ts and few lines of code at a time telling yourself how you made something to work properly.

In Part III, Processes and Threads are covered. Even though the author has included these chapters after the IPC section, a great deal of detail was spent on showing the reader that these classes are not necessarily related to the IPC set of classes. The reader can literally read part III of this book, and gain a good understanding of how to use the thread and the process management classes - remind you that these two topics are difficult to grasp and programming is a bit difficult, but the author shows how cleanly these two topics were covered in ACE. The icing on the cake is the last chapter in Part III: Thread Pools. Two threading models are covered:
Half-sync/half-async model
Leader/follower model
I will leave the details of these two models to the reader.

Part IV covers the "advanced topics" such as shared memory, the configuration framework, timers, and the naming service. Again, for each section an extensive example is given, which makes the topic easy to understand and to follow. The configuration framework is a very well covered section, as it is something that any of us can benefit from in our next design.

... no better way to learn ACE
... than from the experts -- those who design / maintain / extend / port it, and some of those very same people were involved in the creation of this guide.

OK, we've all seen the problems with networked application development -- Windows does it differently than Solaris, which does it differently than Linux, which does it differently than VxWorks, which does it differently than Mac OSX , which does it differently than ... etc. Sockets, threads, timers, mutexes, synchronization primitives, etc. are the bane of developers who want to make their applications connect and communicate with one another in heterogeneous environments. Even the technologies that are cross-platform more or less (BSD sockets, pthreads, shared memory, etc.) are sometimes difficult to use and easy to introduce bugs with. What is a networked application developer to do?

Enter ACE -- the ADAPTIVE Communication Environment, which aims (and largely succeeds) in providing a cross-platform, pattern-based systems framework that hides the platform specifics without sacrificing speed, makes BSD sockets, threads, and system APIs object-based, and allows the same code to be used on a variety of platforms. ACE is used in many large projects around the world which needed to be highly scalable, predictable, portable and easily maintainable, all at once. Enter this book, which does an admirable job both introducing ACE and many of the design patterns it implements to the newcomer, and making some of the finer points of ACE more cogent to those of us who have been working with it for awhile. Each chapter has an introduction (which pattern we're covering now, what problems it solves, how ACE implements it), lots and lots (and lots and lots) of easy-to-read source code examples, and plenty of plain-english explanation as to how this stuff works. In my continuing ACE education, this book (as well as the C++NP books and the ACE-users list) truly helps me to understand ACE, patterns, and all that they are capable of. I am a far better developer as a result, and I cannot give this book any higher praise than that.