Welcome to the latest release of The ACE ORB (TAO).  TAO is an
implementation of a CORBA 2.x-compliant ORB that supports real-time
extensions.  Please see http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html for
more information on TAO.

Some detailed information on this version of TAO is available in the
'docs' subdirectory in HTML format.

The current alpha release of TAO contains the following:

     * An ORB Core based on ACE C++ components. This ORB Core provides 3
       concurrency models: (1) Reactive, (2) Thread-per-Connection,
       and (3) Thread-per-Rate (which is optimized for certain types
       of deterministic real-time systems).

     * An optimized version of the SunSoft IIOP protocol
       interpreter;

     * An implementation of the Portable Object Adapter (POA)
       specification. 

     * A prototype IDL compiler, based on the SunSoft IDL
       compiler.  This IDL compiler generates stubs and skeletons that
       utilize the SunSoft IIOP protocol engine.

     * A Real-time Scheduling Service that determines the priority at
       which Client requests are dispatched by the ORB.

     * A Real-time Event Service that dispatches CORBA events in
       real-time.

     * Implementations of the CORBA COS Naming service and Trader
       service, as well as a logging service.
       
     * Various tests illustrating how to use TAO.
       
The current version of TAO contains source code and tests that are
around 1.5 Megabytes when compressed using GNU gzip.

We've gotten TAO to interoperate with other ORBs (e.g., Orbix,
VisiBroker, miniCOOL, and CORBAplus), so we're confident that its
implementation of IIOP is robust.  We're currently working on the
following features for TAO:
   
     * An IDL compiler that generates optimized compiled stubs and
       skeletons. For this, we're planning to use the Flick IDL
       compiler from University of Utah.

     * A highly extensible, highly optimized set of request
       demultiplexing strategies that provide constant time lookup of
       servants based on object keys and operation names contained in
       CORBA requests.

     * An implementation of the new OMG Audio/Video Streaming
       service, as well as the Property service.
 
We plan to release these features throughout the spring of 1998.  You
can keep track of our progress online at URL

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE_wrappers/TAO/docs/releasenotes/

A quick build note for users who have used ACE with other ORBs:
linking TAO with a version of ACE that must also be linked against
another ORB vendor's library, e.g., liborbix.so, will produce
undefined and most likely unpredictable and erroneous results.

We welcome suggestions for improvement, bug fixes, portability
enhancements, etc. and will strive to integrate correct bug fixes
quickly!  If you have any questions or problems with TAO, please post
them to the ACE mailing list (ace-users@cs.wustl.edu) or send email to
Douglas C. Schmidt (schmidt@cs.wustl.edu) and Chris Cleeland
(cleeland@cs.wustl.edu).

Thanks,

	Douglas C. Schmidt
	schmidt@cs.wustl.edu