C++ Network Programming, Volume 2: Systematic Reuse with ACE and Frameworks

Foreword

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) toolkit has achieved enormous success in the area of middleware for networked computing. Due to its flexibility, performance, platform coverage, and other key properties, ACE enjoys broad acceptance by the networked application software community, as evidenced by its use in thousands of applications, in scores of countries, and in dozens of domains. ACE has also received considerable attention beyond the middleware community since it’s an open-source role model for high-quality and well-designed pattern-oriented software architectures.

But why is ACE so successful? Addressing this question properly takes some thought. To start off, let’s reconsider the Foreword from C++ Network Programming: ...