Building and Installing TAO

TAO has been ported and tested Windows NT, Solaris, VxWorks, and Linux. I expect that major portions of the release will port easily to other platforms that ACE has been ported to. If you can help port TAO to other platforms we'd appreciate it.

TAO can be obtained electronically via the WWW and ftp. Besides getting the TAO release you will need ACE. You will likely need the most recent beta version of ACE because TAO tends to track changes to ACE rather closely.

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.

On UNIX platforms

  1. Set ACE_ROOT environment variable as outlined in the ACE installation notes.

  2. Build and install ACE under $ACE_ROOT.

  3. Set TAO_ROOT environment variable to $ACE_ROOT/TAO.

  4. Build and install the TAO release under $TAO_ROOT.

  5. Change directory to $TAO_ROOT/tests and execute make.

  6. Follow instructions on executing the various examples under $TAO_ROOT/tests.

A Note On Make

Since TAO is built atop ACE, TAO re-uses ACE's Makefile structure as well. Thus, just like ACE requires GNU Make, so too does TAO. More exactly, versions of make which are known to not work include those from Solaris 4.x and 5.x, HP-UX, the latest BSD, etc.

GNU Make can be obtained from various places in source form.

On Windows NT

Before compiling TAO_IDL on NT, you may need to set the environment variable CPP_PATH to where CL.exe is installed on your machine. By default, we set this variable to "C:/Program Files/DevStudio/VC/bin". Your location may vary, however. Notice that if you forget to set this variable before compiling TAO_IDL, you can use CPP_LOCATION to specify the absolute pathname to CL.exe. We set if to "C:/Program Files/DevStudio/VC/bin/CL.exe" when we do use it.

Visual C++ 5.0

It works best if TAO is placed in ACE_wrappers so TAO ends up in ACE_wrappers\TAO because the Visual C++ 5.0 Project files are set up to work in this configuration. If you move it, then make sure you change the project file to look for the include and library files in the correct place.

  1. Make sure ACE is built (For Visual C++ 5.0, use ace.dsw or ace-vc50.dsw, whichever is in your copy of ACE).

  2. Load the workspace tao\TAO.dsw and build the TAO library.

  3. To build the Cubit test, load the workspace tests\Cubit\TAO\test.dsw and build both client and server.

Visual C++ 4.x

  1. In Tools|Options, go to the Directories page and make sure that include files paths includes ACE_wrappers\ and the root directory of TAO (which can be ACE_wrappers\TAO if installed there). The library files paths should include ACE_wrappers\ace.

  2. Load the project file tao\TAO.mdp and build the TAO library.

  3. To build the Cubit test, load the project file tests\Cubit\TAO\test.mdp and build both client and server.

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