Concluding Remarks
Contemporary business climates require software developers to move applications nimbly among a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. The standards developed by vendors and industry groups to ease the burden of porting software often present a myriad of conflicting and divergent facilities and APIs, making it unnecessarily hard to develop portable software. Developers today deserve better.
Host infrastructure middleware is an important set of technologies that helps alleviate many of the portability challenges with OS APIs in order to develop efficientyet reusable and retargetablenetworked applications faster and easier. The ACE toolkit's host infrastructure middleware provides a layered and efficient set of classes and frameworks whose design is guided by patterns that alleviate the problems of developing portable software across a wide range of platforms. ACE's open-source roots have catalyzed its growth since its inception over a decade ago. After Doug Schmidt began developing ACE in 1991, more than 1,400 contributors from more than 50 countries have contributed to ACE. This wide range of shared expertise and resources enables ACE's portability to extend across the world's most popular general-purpose and real-time operating systems. Today, ACE is used by thousands of development teams, ranging from large Fortune 500 companies to small startups.
ACE has fundamentally changed the way in which complex networked applications and middleware are designed and implemented. Its open-source development model and self-supporting user community culture is similar in spirit and enthusiasm to that driving Linus Torvalds's popular Linux OS. The ACE developer and user community have been instrumental in transitioning ACE from the personal hobby of a single researcher into one of the world's most widely used C++ frameworks for concurrent object-oriented network programming across a wide range of hardware and software platforms. We hope you enjoy using ACE as much as we've enjoyed developing it.