Welcome to the alpha release of The ACE ORB (TAO).  TAO is an
implementation of a CORBA2-compliant ORB that will support real-time
extensions.  Please see http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html for
more information on TAO.

The current alpha release of TAO contains the following:

* An ORB Core based on ACE components and an optimized version of
  the SunSoft IIOP protocol engine;

* An implementation of a Basic Object Adapter (BOA);

* Various tests illustrating how to use TAO in its current state.

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.  However, this alpha release of TAO does not yet contain the
following:

* An IDL compiler;

* An real-time version of the new Portable Object Adapter (POA);

* The real-time scheduling service.

We're currently working on these features and we plan to release them
throughout the summer of 1997.  Please note that no amount of proding
will get them out any faster, unless you are willing to contribute
time and/or $$$ to the effort.

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!  Just remember
that TAO does not provide all the features of a commercial ORB at the
moment.

Key components in TAO (e.g., the Object Adapter) will change
substantially over the summer.  Thus, any development performed in the
interim will require additional effort (e.g., writing stubs and
skeletons by hand), and applications may need to be re-written to work
with new features in the forthcoming releases.

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