CIAO - Component-Integrated ACE ORB

Introduction

CIAO is TAO's implementation of CORBA Component Model (CCM) specially optimized for distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems. This page contains links to other documents and resources for building and using CIAO.

The CIAO Project

CCM-defined Interface Diagrams

Here is a set of UML diagrams that we use to figure out the relationship among all the different interfaces in CCM. You can browse the related part from the following list:

All these diagrams are generated from the CCM.vsd Visio file (The same file in Visio V.5 format is here.) and OpenOffice source file DAnCE-Dynamic.sxd

CIAO's D&C Framework (DAnCE) part-by-part

DAnCE's implementation is based on the OMG's Deployment and Configuration Specification version [ptc/2003-07-08]. Here is a list of the major actors of CIAO runtime that a user should be aware of.

NodeManager: A daemon process responsible for managing NodeApplications that reside in the same physical node.

NodeApplicationManager: A infrastructure component responsible for deploying locality-constrained applications onto a node. A NodeApplicationManager is usually created by NodeManager.

NodeApplication: A component server instance spawned by NodeApplicationManager.

ExecutionManager: Infrastructure component responsible for executing an component-based DRE application based on the information from DeploymentPlan.

DomainApplicationManager: Domain-oriented auxiliary component created and used by ExecutionManager to deploy the component-based DRE application at the domain level.
PlanLauncher: Executor component responsible for parsing the XML-based deploymentplan and passing the plan to ExecutionManager for execution.

To understand the runtime inter-relationships of various CIAO actors, you may click here to see a sequence diagram that gives you a clear representation of what's happening when you start a DAnCE-based DRE application. Special thanks to Friedhelm Wolf who initiated and contributed most part of this diagram.

CIAO CCM tutorials

There are several tutorials to help you understand CIAO and CCM:

Tutorial on the CORBA Component Model (CCM). This tutorial presents an overview of the CORBA Component Model (CCM), describing its key features and illustrating how to write CCM applications in C++.
$(CIAO_ROOT)/DAnCE/examples/Hello. This example illustrates how to build and deploy a CIAO based application step-by-step. There is also a detailed documentation explaining this example avalable in both PDF and PowerPoint format.
$(CIAO_ROOT)/docs/tutorials/Quoter/Simple. This example illustrates the implementation of the "famous" Quoter example in the CIAO world. Please refer to README for more information.

$(CIAO_ROOT)/docs/tutorials/COSMIC/. This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to use CoSMIC to generate deployment descriptors requied by the above Quoter example