The ACE ORB (TAO)

TAO (The ACE ORB) is an open source, advanced, CORBA-compliant, real-time Object Request Broker (ORB).  TAO is designed to meet the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of real-time applications, resulting in superior end-to-end predictability, efficiency, and scalable performance.

TAO has been built with components from the ACE framework allowing for a highly extensible architecture.  Although TAO was designed to meet the demanding requirements of real-time applications, it is also well-suited for general-purpose CORBA applications.

Why TAO?

• Well-suited for use in real-time environments, where qualities of service such as end-to-end predictability, avoidance of priority inversions, bounds on latency and jitter, and guarantees on bandwidth and resource availability are as important as the functionality of the application itself.
• Well-suited for use in conventional (i.e., non real-time) environments needing a general-purpose ORB without leveraging any of TAO's real-time features.
• Exhibits high-performance characteristics by maximizing throughput and optimizing or minimizing many internal operations, such as request demultiplexing, operation dispatching, presentation layer conversions, synchronization, context switching, memory management, and data copying.
• Complies with open standards, such as the OMG CORBA 3 and IDL-to-C++ language mapping specifications, as well as many other OMG specifications.
• Configurable to adapt to the needs of many different operating environments and application requirements.
• Still being selected for mission critical projects and new features being added by its new users.