Product Description

With the Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE), developers have what they've long sought: a mature, open source, object-oriented framework for building enterprise applications more rapidly and cost-effectively. Now, ACE's creator and one of its leading consultants present the first comprehensive guide to ACE -- and to building extensible object-oriented software with C++ in distributed, heterogeneous environments. The authors begin by describing the key design challenges that arise when objects are distributed beyond a single thread in a single process. They demonstrate how middleware and the ACE toolkit can be applied together to address many of these challenges; and introduce a taxonomy of middleware layers for understanding and solving distributed design problems. It then shows how ACE provides flexible, portable, and efficient support for each of these design dimensions. Extensive C++ code samples are provided. For all developers, analysts, and architects using C++ to build enterprise applications.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #346136 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover

As networks, devices, and systems continue to evolve, software engineers face the unique challenge of creating reliable distributed applications within frequently changing environments. C++ Network Programming, Volume 1, provides practical solutions for developing and optimizing complex distributed systems using the ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE), a revolutionary open-source framework that runs on dozens of hardware platforms and operating systems.

This book guides software professionals through the traps and pitfalls of developing efficient, portable, and flexible networked applications. It explores the inherent design complexities of concurrent networked applications and the tradeoffs that must be considered when working to master them.

C++ Network Programming begins with an overview of the issues and tools involved in writing distributed concurrent applications. The book then provides the essential design dimensions, patterns, and principles needed to develop flexible and efficient concurrent networked applications. The book's expert author team shows you how to enhance design skills while applying C++ and patterns effectively to develop object-oriented networked applications.

Readers will find coverage of:

• C++ network programming, including an overview and strategies for addressing common development challenges The ACE Toolkit
• Connection protocols, message exchange, and message-passing versus shared memory
• Implementation methods for reusable networked application services
• Concurrency in object-oriented network programming
• Design principles and patterns for ACE wrapper facades

With this book, C++ developers have at their disposal the most complete toolkit available for developing successful, multiplatform, concurrent networked applications with ease and efficiency.

About the Author

Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt is the original developer of ACE and The ACE ORB (TAO). He is a professor at Vanderbilt University, where he studies patterns, optimizations, middleware, and model-based tools for distributed real-time and embedded systems. He is a former editor-in-chief of C++ Report and columnist for C/C++ Users Journal.

Stephen D. Huston is an internationally recognized expert in networked application development. He has more than 25 years of software development experience, focusing on network protocol and C++ networked application development in a wide range of hardware and software environments. Steve has been working with the ACE development team for over 10 years since founding Riverace Corporation, the premier provider of ACE support, training, and consulting services.

Customer Reviews

Good intro to the lower layers of ACE
This book is written by ACE's original developer, so it should be a pretty comprehensive and accurate description of the codebase - and it certainly is.

Unfortunately, the book itself adds little to the wealth of material available on the ACE website, so it's not particularly good value for money.

There are two themes to the book: patterns & portability, and the ACE APIs. The sections covering the first are pretty good and the concepts were leading edge a few years ago but now seem to be part of just about every decent C++ book. The ACE API description is convenient but, as I said earlier, can be found online.

The book covers only the lower layers of ACE, which are the easier bits to understand and use - coverage of the upper layers would be much more interesting.

Not sure who this book is aimed at
The blurb for this book calls it authoritative. And it is authoritative in the sense that it is written by the people behind ACE. But it is not authoritative in the sense that it isn't a complete reference.

As somebody who has written native code for handling Sockets, process management, threading etc on various platforms, then over time integrated OO and patterns to make it easier to use (including across platforms), and slowly worked my way towards what I consider a definitive way of doing things, I find reading this book interesting in that it's like a tick list to which I can go "yeap, I found that too" with just the odd "ooh, actually I would do that differently in this specific situation, but for the general case yes that's how I do it too". So, for me this book is interesting now, but if I was new to ACE (I'm not) or new to the underlying platform APIs I am not so sure how interesting I would find it. It gives more of a taster of what ACE can do than providing a complete tutorial. It gives more of a justification of why ACE does things the way it does rather than provide a complete reference. So, interesting for me now, but I'm really not sure who the book is aimed at. It could be used as one step of a tutorial, giving familiarity of what ACE can do, if not enough detail to really do serious stuff. It could be used to persuade people that it's usually better to use ACE than invest time and money re-inventing the wheel... Otherwise, I just don't know...

Is ACE worth using? Most of the time, yes. If you need a book about ACE then this is probably the place to start, but online is the place to find the detailed information that you will need when using it.