The ACE Programmer's Guide: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming [Paperback]

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.

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.

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.

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