ACE Communications control - The all-mighty Reactor

• One of the nicest parts of ACE is its socket-programming wrapper module - the ACE Reactor, and the ACE Acceptor-Connector.
• Using them, it is extremely easy to write a select-based server that handles as many clients as we want.
• This Reactor allows adding clients and server-listeners quickly - all you need to do is derive from the proper Acceptor (server) or Connector (client) class, implement a few methods, and you're set.
• Thus, we had a Link class to handle the WAN link (where compression and connections interleaving is performed).
• We had a similar class to bring up listener sockets on the branch-office, and to connect to the data-center servers (on the data-center side).
• It took about 2 weeks to have software to proxy one service (with no management or compression capabilities). It took a while more to make this software configurable via an XML file.

Originally written by guy keren