Our redistribution of The ACE ORB (TAO), pronounced “dow,” is an Open Source, C++, CORBA-compliant object request broker (ORB).
Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) TAO incorporates the patterns and components of the ACE framework and may be used to invoke operations on distributed objects without concern for object location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols and interconnects, and hardware. TAO leverages the best software practices and patterns to automate the delivery of high-performance and real-time QoS to distributed applications.
Features
- Second generation real-time ORB with many CORBA services
- Designed for real-time applications
- CORBA 3.0, IIOP 1.2 compliant
- C++ bindings
- Wide platform support
- Portable architecture
- Exceptional performance
- Highly configurable
- Reduced memory footprint
- Robust thread pool management
- Fault-tolerant naming
- Fault-tolerant implementation repository
- Enterprise-class load balancing integrated with the naming service
- Sharable services with JacORB (Java ORB)
Who Should Be Using TAO?
Developers of distributed and embedded applications who require (1) predictable timing characteristics and robustness since they are used in mission-critical real-time systems; and/or (2) low development cost and fast time-to-market.
Benefits
- TAO is free, Open Source software (FOSS), which means no vendor lock-in and maximum user control. There are no license fees whatsoever, and the full source code is available at no cost.
- An ORB core that supports deterministic real-time concurrency and dispatching strategies. TAO's ORB-core concurrency models are designed to minimize context switching, synchronization, dynamic memory allocation, and data movement.
- Active de-multiplexing and perfect hashing optimizations that associate client requests with target objects in constant time, regardless of the number of objects, operations, or nested POAs.
- TAO's pluggable protocols allow the support of real-time I/O subsystems designed to minimize priority inversion interrupt overhead over high-speed ATM networks and real-time interconnects, such as VME. It also runs efficiently over standard TCP/IP protocols.
- TAO's real-time event service and static and dynamic scheduling services integrate the capabilities of TAO described above.
- TAO provides all these optimizations within the standard CORBA 3.x reference model. TAO's performance and footprint characteristics indicate the time and space trade-offs associated with configuring applications to use the optimizations described above.
- Fault-tolerant naming and implementation repository services bring resilience to application solutions.
- Enterprise-class dynamic thread pooling on the ORB and POAs accommodate varying run-time resource needs.
TAO Developer's Guide
The TAO Developer's Guide covers everything you need to start developing and maintaining distributed applications using TAO.
Using TAO with VxWorks®
As a Wind River® Partner, we provide complimentary ACE and TAO packages for VxWorks, Wind River's leading real-time operating system.
