Developer Forum

i,

Thanks to the substantial efforts by many developers, testers, and
users, we are pleased to announce the new x.5.2 ACE+TAO+CIAO beta. The
latest beta has been tagged ACE-5.5.2, TAO-1.5.2, and CIAO-0.5.2. As
usual, it is available at:

http://deuce.doc.wustl.edu/Download.html

The doxygen documentation for the beta is available. We do have some
missing files in that package which we resolve as soon as possible.

We encourage you to download the new beta, use it with your
applications, and let us know if you encounter any problems. Please use
the:

$ACE_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM
$TAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM
$CIAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM

so that we have the proper version/platform/compiler /options you're
using to report problems. We also request that you take a look at

$TAO_ROOT/docs/releasenotes

for the status of various ongoing projects at the DOC groups of WashU,
UCI, and Vanderbilt to move ACE+TAO+CIAO forward. Overviews of our
recent progress and upcoming plans are available at

$ACE_ROOT/NEWS
$TAO_ROOT/NEWS
$CIAO_ROOT/NEWS

The overall success rates for the test results gathered from all our
daily builds is 95.82 for the ACE tests and 93.47 for the TAO tests.
Please see

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/scoreboard/

for a summary of these tests. As always, we appreciate your help in
resolving the remaining problems. Please see

ACE_ROOT/docs/ACE-bug-process.html

for an overview of our bug fixing policies.

The following is a list of key changes since the last release. Please
refer to the corresponding ChangeLog files or Bugzilla entries for more
details on the problem and the nature of fixes applied.

==============
Changes to ACE
==============

. Added support for:
- VxWorks 6.2 for the rtp model using pthread support
- OpenVMS 8.2 for Alpha

. Removed code and configurations that provided support for:
- Visual C++ 6.0 and 7.0
- Chorus
- pSOS
- KAI C++ on all platforms

. Explicit template instantiation support has been removed. This effectively
removes support for Sun Forte 6 and 7 which required explicit template
instantiation to build ACE reliably.

. Added support for multiple independent Service Repositories through
configuration contexts called "Gestalt". Full backwards compatibility
is maintained through the existing ACE_Service_Config static methods,
while direct individual repository access is enabled through instances
of the new ACE_Service_Gestalt class. ACE_Service_Config has changed to
a specialization of ACE_Service_Gestalt and is only responsible for the
process-wide configuration.

. To support dynamically-sized ACE_Log_Record messages, the netsvcs
logging components now use ACE CDR encoding and transfer mechanisms
inspired by the examples in Chapter 4 of the C++NPv1 book.
The client and server logging daemons in ACE 5.5.2 and forward will
not interoperate with those in previous ACE versions.

. Added a wrapper for the sendfile API (ACE_OS::sendfile()).

. Added support for netlink sockets on Linux.

. Added a new method, ACE_Task::last_thread(). This method returns the
thread
ID (ACE_thread_t) of the last thread to exit from the ACE_Task object.
Users checking to see if a thread is the last one out (for example, to
know
when to perform cleanup operations) should compare the current thread ID
to
the return value from last_thread(). This is a change from the