Release Notes for OCI's Distribution of TAO 1.2a
Copyright 2000-2002 by Object Computing, Inc.


NOTE:   These release notes are current as of TAO 1.2a (which corresponds to OCI part number TBD). The latest version of these release notes can be viewed or downloaded from OCI's web site at http://www.theaceorb.com/releasenotes.

Table of Contents

  1. General Notes
    1. Heritage--Relationship to DOC Releases
    2. Building Requires GNU Make
  2. New Features Since TAO 1.1a
    1. Major feature-compliance with OMG's CORBA 2.5 specification
    2. Support for OMG CORBA Security Level 1 specification
    3. Improved IDL compiler
    4. Availability of Real-time Emulation
    5. Additional configuration options and support for additional platforms
    6. Options for Footprint Reduction and improved modularization
    7. Improved Pluggable Protocol framework with additional pluggable protocols
    8. Complete support for Interoperable Naming Service
    9. Improvements in the Notification Service
    10. Improved Multicast Service Discovery
    11. Implementation of OMG Interface Repository
    12. Improved Implementation Repository
  3. Platform-specific Notes
    1. Version Information & Platform/Version-specific Known Problems
    2. Known Problems Across Platforms

  1. General Notes

    1. Heritage--Relationship to DOC Releases

      TAO 1.2a derives from the DOC TAO 1.2.1 beta kit with bugfix-related patches selectively applied to enhance stability. A record of applied patches can be found in OCIChangeLog files installed with the distribution. At the time of this release, the current DOC beta kit was TAO 1.2.2.

    2. GNU Make Required on Unix

      With the exception of Windows operating systems, building ACE and TAO from source code requires GNU Make. While you can use other tools to build applications using ACE & TAO, using GNU Make lets you leverage the existing build system distributed with ACE & TAO. If you need GNU Make, you can get a source distribution through http://www.theaceorb.com/gnumake as well as other places.

  2. New Features Since TAO 1.1a

    1. Major feature-compliance with OMG's CORBA 2.5 specification

      TAO 1.2a complies with most features of the CORBA 2.5 specification, including the following specific features:

      • OMG Real-time (RT) CORBA specification

        TAO 1.2a includes support for the OMG RT CORBA specification. RT CORBA, an optional part of the CORBA 2.5 specification, is designed to give developers a high degree of control over the allocation and management of run-time resources to improve quality of service (QoS) and end-to-end predictability in time-critical applications.

      • Portable Interceptors

        TAO 1.2a adds complete support for CORBA-compliant Portable Interceptors. Portable Interceptors in CORBA are objects that the ORB invokes at predefined points in the request and reply paths of an operation invocation or during the generation of an interoperable object reference (IOR). Developers can define their own code to be executed at each interception point to perform application-specific tasks such as logging, debugging, or security and authentication.

      • Bi-directional GIOP/IIOP

        TAO 1.2a includes full support for bi-directional GIOP/IIOP. Bi-directional GIOP provides a solution to the problem of invoking methods on clients behind a firewall.

      • Dynamic Anys

        TAO 1.2a includes full support for CORBA-compliant Dynamic Anys. Previously (in TAO 1.1a), Dynamic Anys were based on the earlier CORBA 2.2 specification.

      • Locality-constrained interfaces ("local")

        TAO 1.2a adds support for local interfaces from CORBA 3 and includes local implementations of several standard interfaces, such as the Portable Object Adapter (POA) and servant managers. Local interfaces obviate the need to define special pseudo-objects and pseudo IDL (PIDL) for objects that are never called remotely, such as the POA and ORB interfaces.

    2. Support for OMG CORBA Security Level 1 specification

      TAO 1.2a adds support for the OMG CORBA Security Level 1 specification. OMG's Security Service specification is a comprehensive treatment of security as it relates to distributed object systems and applications.

    3. Improved IDL compiler

      TAO 1.2a introduces many IDL compiler enhancements and bug fixes, including support for re-opened modules and forward declaration of an interface that is defined in a separate IDL file.

    4. Availability of Real-time Emulation

      TAO 1.2a adds a virtual real-time emulator to enable real-time performance analysis on non-real-time platforms.

    5. Additional configuration options and support for additional platforms

      In TAO 1.2a, support has been extended to new platforms, operating systems, and C++ compilers, including several 64-bit and real-time operating systems. Supported operating systems include Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, VxWorks, LynxOS, ChorusOS, ReliantUNIX, UnixWare, and OS/9. TAO 1.2a also introduces changes to configuration options to allow developers and administrators complete control over their application's run-time environment.

    6. Options for Footprint Reduction and improved modularization

      In TAO 1.2a, the core TAO library has been divided into many smaller libraries so applications only need to link in the features they need. In addition, TAO 1.2a includes an application development tool that you can use to build minimal libraries containing only those features that your application actually uses.

    7. Improved Pluggable Protocol framework with additional pluggable protocols

      TAO 1.2a comes with an improved open pluggable protocols framework so developers can create their own transports that seamlessly integrate with the rest of the TAO ORB. Custom protocols can be developed to improve performance, reduce bandwidth consumption, enforce security, or allow the ORB to operate over proprietary transport protocols. Applications need not be aware of the existence of these custom protocols.

      In addition to OMG-standard IIOP, TAO 1.2a includes implementations of the following pluggable protocols: UIOP (uses UNIX-domain sockets), SHMIOP (shared memory transport), DIOP (UDP-based transport), and SSLIOP (uses the OpenSSL implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer).

    8. Complete support for Interoperable Naming Service

      TAO 1.2a provides complete support for the OMG Interoperable Naming Service specification, including corbaloc and corbaname object URLs and support for the CosNaming::NamingContextExt interface.

    9. Improvements in the Notification Service

      TAO 1.2a includes many enhancements to TAO's implementation of the OMG Notification Service, including multithreaded event dispatching and filter evaluation, full ETCL filtering constraint grammar, support for the SequencePushConsumer interface, and support for most of the standard quality of service (QoS) properties.

    10. Improved Multicast Service Discovery

      TAO 1.2a provides developers and administrators with better control over multicast discovery of TAO's CORBA services (such as the Naming and Object Trader services) and the addition of a new mcast: object URL scheme.

    11. Implementation of OMG Interface Repository

      TAO 1.2a adds an implementation of the OMG Interface Repository specification for dynamic discovery of IDL types and interfaces.

    12. Improved Implementation Repository

      TAO 1.2a includes several improvements and bug fixes to the Implementation Repository.

    Details on these, and many other features of TAO 1.2a, will be detailed in the forthcoming OCI's TAO Developer's Guide, Version 1.2a, available separately.

  3. Platform-specific Notes

    1. Version Information and Known Problems on Specific Platforms

    2. Known Problems Across Platforms

      Problems using GNU Make Parallel Builds

      Using the -j for GNU Make can cause strange build errors when building code generated by the IDL compiler if dependencies are not correctly specified in the Makefile.

      Test Failures Across Platforms

      The following tests fail on most platforms:
      • $TAO_ROOT/tests/MT_Timeout
      • $TAO_ROOT/tests/Oneway_Buffering
      • $TAO_ROOT/tests/AMI_Buffering

      For platform/version-specific test failures and known problems, please review the release notes for each version/platform.


OCI provides commercial support for TAO 1.2a. Contact sales for more information.