The Little ACE That Could

• For the communications library there was no doubt - ACE.
• ACE (Adaptive Communications Environment) also happens to support OS-portability APIs, portable multi-threading APIs, portable multi-processes APIs, etc.
• For the higher-level communications that did not need too much control (i.e. did not run across a WAN) - we wanted CORBA, and so TAO (The ACE ORB) was the natural choice.
• Having (good) prior experience with both of them couldn't hurt either ;)
• For WAN communications, CORBA was not tweak-able enough (at least not without a high learning-curve), and thus we settled for direct use of ACE for the WAN link (as well as the communications with workstations in the offices, and servers in the data-center).

Originally written by guy keren