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The ACE Programmer's Guide: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming
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Author: Stephen D. Huston, James CE Johnson, Umar Syyid
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201699710
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (17 October, 2003)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 6,898
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
What would you do with all this power?
This book is yet another great example of how the ACE framework can save you a lifetime of development. Within this book is the knowledge and experience to excell your applications to the next level and become more productive then ever. If your code base deals with networking or even if you just need to have cross platform compatibility then this book is a must have to teach you the ways of ACE.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Tries to Decouple C++ from Specific OS details
Network programming can be very difficult, given such issues as latency and different hardware/operating systems on your net. At the very least, the latter can have different byte orderings an datatype sizes, if you write in C or C++. Now in C, by the late 1980s, such headaches caused several unix vendors (mainly Sun) to converge on supporting a key utility, rpcgen (and affiliated routines). This let you write common C code for client/server applications, and compile these on various platforms. Lo, things usually worked!
But as software projects grew in complexity, writing in procedural language like C became harder. Hence the rise of C++. Well, wouldn't it be nice to reimplement and extend rpcgen? (It had numerous limitations.) The idea was to finesse/bury OS specific details at a lower level of the code, where you could often ignore it. You can imagine ACE as filling this need. I'm not saying that this is how or why ACE was developed. But I am trying to argue from YOUR background, which I assume is C++ and C.
The book describes significantly more functionality in ACE than merely an extension of rpcgen. Even if you don't have a C++ networking application, but are writing a standalone application, ACE may be useful. It increases your chances of writing portable code. For one thing, it heavily downplays the use of OS-supplied compiler macros. In both C++ and C code that will be maintained on several platforms, this is a notorious source of bugs. Very brittle. Just having ACE subsume these issues should give a maintenance productivity gain. You won't see this immediately when coding the first version of your application. But experienced developers should see the payoff.
Plus, ACE also offers higher level design patterns. Here, I don't know how applicable they might be to your specific problems. But just having the patterns increases your coding arsenal.
Rating: 5 out of 5
... no better way to learn ACE
... than from the experts -- those who design / maintain / extend / port it, and some of those very same people were involved in the creation of this guide.OK, we've all seen the problems with networked application development -- Windows does it differently than Solaris, which does it differently than Linux, which does it differently than VxWorks, which does it differently than Mac OSX , which does it differently than ... etc. Sockets, threads, timers, mutexes, synchronization primitives, etc. are the bane of developers who want to make their applications connect and communicate with one another in heterogeneous environments. Even the technologies that are cross-platform more or less (BSD sockets, pthreads, shared memory, etc.) are sometimes difficult to use and easy to introduce bugs with. What is a networked application developer to do? Enter ACE -- the ADAPTIVE Communication Environment, which aims (and largely succeeds) in providing a cross-platform, pattern-based systems framework that hides the platform specifics without sacrificing speed, makes BSD sockets, threads, and system APIs object-based, and allows the same code to be used on a variety of platforms. ACE is used in many large projects around the world which needed to be highly scalable, predictable, portable and easily maintainable, all at once. Enter this book, which does an admirable job both introducing ACE and many of the design patterns it implements to the newcomer, and making some of the finer points of ACE more cogent to those of us who have been working with it for awhile. Each chapter has an introduction (which pattern we're covering now, what problems it solves, how ACE implements it), lots and lots (and lots and lots) of easy-to-read source code examples, and plenty of plain-english explanation as to how this stuff works. In my continuing ACE education, this book (as well as the C++NP books and the ACE-users list) truly helps me to understand ACE, patterns, and all that they are capable of. I am a far better developer as a result, and I cannot give this book any higher praise than that.
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