Developer Forum

i all,

Thanks to the efforts of many developers, testers, and users, we are
pleased to announce the latest ACE+TAO+CIAO x.6.3 release. The
x.6.3 release is available from the download location at

http://download.dre.vanderbilt.edu/

under the heading "Latest Beta kit".

The doxygen documentation for the release is also available. The
prebuild cidlc binaries are also available. In addition to the
packages combined of sources and generate makefiles, this release also
provides source-only packages for the group of users who use MPC to
generate their own makefiles.

We encourage you to download the new release, 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 98% for the ACE tests and 95% 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 any remaining problems. Please see:

ACE_ROOT/docs/ACE-bug-process.html

for an overview of our bug fixing policies. Moreover, please see

http://www.dre.vanderbilt.edu/support.html

for information commercial support services available from various
companies.

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

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

. Deprecated Visual Age 5 and older

. Closed a rare race condition hole whereby ACE_Atomic_Op<> function
pointers would not be fully initialized prior to use. See bugzilla
3185 for details.

. Tweaks to support MacOS X Leopard (10.5 and 10.5.1) on Intel

. Fixed compile problems with MinGW with GCC 4.2. Do note that we do see
much more test failures then when using GCC 3.4.

. Changed to use synchronous exception handling with msvc 8/9 which is the
default. Asynchrous exception handling does catch access violations but
it leads to lower performance and other problems. See also bugzilla 3169

. Make ace_main extern C with VxWorks so that it doesn't get mangled

. Fixed compile errors and warnings for VxWorks 6.6

. Added an MPC generator for the WindRiver Workbench 2.6 which is shipped
with VxWorks 6.4

. Added support for CodeGear C++ Builder 2007 with December 2007 update
installed

. Added support for VxWorks 5.5.1

. Implemented the const reverse iterator for ACE_Hash_Map_Manager_Ex

. Increased support for using ACE_Hash_Map_Manager_Ex with STL <algorithm>
functions based on latest standard C++ draft

==============
Changes to TAO
==============

. Fixed send side logic (both synchronous and asynchronous) to honor
timeouts. An RTT enabled two-way invocation could earlier hang
indefinately if tcp buffers were flooded.

. Bug fix for cases