OCI's TAO 1.6a release is based on the DOC (see http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/doc-group.html) group's TAO 1.6.7 beta kit. OCI has performed extensive testing of TAO across a wide variety of platforms and added several enhancements, some of which were funded by our customers.

TAO 1.6a includes many new features and improvements over the previous commercially supported (TAO 1.5a) release and has been extensively tested across a wide variety of platforms (over 14,000 tests run on over 30 hardware/os/compiler combinations) to increase availability and stability. Some of the more important and visible new features of TAO 1.6a include:

These features were added subsequent to TAO 1.6.7

  • Added support for filter persistence to the Notification Service.
  • Added a client validation (and cleanup) feature to the Notification Service. A number of related options to control this feature were introduced.
  • Changed default linking behavior on Sun OS platforms to avoid setting an RPATH (distrib=1).

These features were added subsequent to TAO 1.5a as part of TAO 1.6.7

  • Removed exception specifications from many member functions.
  • New diffserv library to specify diffserv priorities independent of RTCORBA.
  • Added support for using AMI with DII and AMH with DSI.
  • Improved wide character compilation support.
  • Added support for IPv6 to RT Event Service federations
  • The TAO_IORManip library now has a filter that allows users to create new references by filtering profiles from multi-profile object refences.
  • Added support for IPv6 to MIOP and DIOP.
  • Added support for forward declared unions and structs to the Interface Repository Loader.
  • A new security option was added that allows mixed security levels in servers, where some objects grant unrestricted access and others require secure connections.
  • Added -Gos option to the IDL compiler to generate ostream operators for IDL declarations.
  • Various footprint improvements (mainly moving code to optional libraries).
  • Added the -RTORBDynamicThreadRunTime option to control the lifetime of dynamic RTCORBA threads.
  • TAO now conforms to the OMG's C++ Language Mapping V1.2. Among other changes, CORBA::LocalObject is now reference counted by default.
  • Added wildcard support for pools and lanes in the -ORBLaneListenEndpoints option.
  • TAO now supports ZIOP which compresses ORB messages.
  • Added the -m option to the Implementation Repository's Activator. This option allows the user to override the value for the number of environment variables passes to child processes. The current default is 512.
  • New ORB_init() options (see $TAO_ROOT/docs/Options.html in the source)
    • -ORBAMICollocation: disables collocation for AMI calls.
    • -ORBAcceptErrorDelay: Controls the amount of time to wait before attempting to accept new connections when a possibly transient error occurs during accepting a new connection.
    • -ORBIPHopLimit: Controls the number of hops an IPv4/IPv6 packet can outlive.
    • -ORBIPMulticastLoop: MIOP-specific option that controls whether multicast packets are looped to the originating host.
  • Notification Service changes:
    • New monitoring capabilities were added.
    • The Monitor and Control interface can now be used to remove consumer and supplier proxies and admins.
    • Added a -Timeout option to specify a roundtrip timeout for client communication.
    • Add -DefaultConsumerAdminFilterOp and -DefaultSupplierAdminFilterOp to allow setting of the default filter operators.

 Important Bug Fixes since 1.5a

  • Several problems with AMI support and collocated AMI support have been fixed.
  • Some problems with Location Forward were corrected.
  • Round trip timeouts are now honored consistently.
  • A number of IDL compiler defects have been fixed, many in areas related to valuetypes and typedefs.

TAO 1.6a is available for immediate download, in source-code form, from . The new, updateded edition of the TAO Developer's Guide is currently under development.

Downloads for TAO 1.6a

All Patches for TAO 1.6a (none at this time)

TAO 1.5a Release Notes

 

TAO is a truly open-source project with literally thousands of contributors. In particular, OCI would like to acknowledge and thank the Distributed Object Computing team for all their hard work and commitment to TAO.

OCI offers a wide array of CORBA technical support options for TAO and the Java-based ORB, JacORB and OpalORB the Perl based ORB. Our service areas include systems architecture, large-scale distributed application architecture and object-oriented design and development. We specialize in architecting solutions with middleware technologies such as CORBA, J2EE, XML and wireless. For more information, please see http://www.objectcomputing.com or contact sales for more information.

The OCI TAO Team