The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) is a freely available,
open-source object-oriented (OO) framework that implements many core
patterns for concurrent communication software. ACE provides a rich set
of reusable C++ wrapper facades and framework components that perform
common communication software tasks across a range of OS platforms. The
communication software tasks provided by ACE include event demultiplexing
and event handler dispatching, signal handling, service initialization,
interprocess communication, shared memory management, message routing,
dynamic (re)configuration of distributed services, concurrent execution
and synchronization.

ACE is targeted for developers of high-performance and real-time
communication services and applications. It simplifies the development of
OO network applications and services that utilize interprocess
communication, event demultiplexing, explicit dynamic linking, and
concurrency. In addition, ACE automates system configuration and
reconfiguration by dynamically linking services into applications at
run-time and executing these services in one or more processes or
threads.

ACE continues to improve and its future is bright. ACE is supported
commercially by multiple companies using an open-source business
model. In addition, many members of the ACE development team are
currently working on building The ACE ORB (TAO).

Homepage:
http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html
