Welcome to the alpha release of The ACE ORB (TAO).  TAO is an
implementation of a CORBA2-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).

     * A highly optimized version of the SunSoft IIOP protocol
       interpreter;

     * An prototype 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 interpreter.

     * Various tests illustrating how to use TAO.
       
The current version of TAO contains source code and tests that are
around 0.4 Megabytes when compressed using GNU gzip.

We've gotten TAO to interoperate with other ORBs (e.g., Orbix and
Visigenic), so we're confident that the implementation of IIOP is
robust. We're currently working on the following features for TAO:
   
     * A complete POA implementation.

     * 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.

     * 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.
       
We plan to release these features throughout the fall of 1997. You can
keep track of our progress online.

Please feel free to experiment with, dissect, repair, use, etc., TAO.
We gratefully accept bug reports, appreciate bug fixes/enhancements,
and will strive to integrate correct bug fixes quickly!

If you have any questions, please post them to the ACE mailing list
<ace-users@cs.wustl.edu> until we get a TAO mailing list established.

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.

If you have any questions, please post them to the ACE mailing list
(ace-users@cs.wustl.edu) until we get a TAO mailing list established.

Thanks,

	Douglas C. Schmidt
	schmidt@cs.wustl.edu