ACE in detail

Firstly, ACE offers an OS abstraction layer which hides operating system specifics. The advantage of this layer is that it becomes possible to develop applications that are independent of both the operating system and the compiler.

On top of this OS abstraction layer, a C++ wrapper layer is implemented which makes it possible to access OS specifics by means of C++ classes. This C++ wrapper layer protects you against difficult and ever changing OS APIs. Many errors that would otherwise only be found by debugging during testing will now be detected by the C++ compiler. This drastically simplifies the testing phase.

On top of this C++ wrapper layer, standard frameworks and services have been developed. For example, TAO (The ACE Orb) is a real-time CORBA Orb that was developed using ACE.

The C++NPv2 book describes a number of these frameworks in detail. These frameworks include Reactor and Proactor for event handling, Acceptor/Connector for connecting components and Service Configurator for dynamically configured applications.

A detailed description of ACE can be found on the ACE site