ACE Tutorial 001
A Beginners Guide to Using the ACE Toolkit

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to create a very simple server capable of handling multiple client connections. Unlike a "traditional" server application, this one handles all requests in one process. Issues of multi-processing and multi-threading will be handled in later tutorials.

What do you need to create a server?

1. Something which accepts connections from clients
2. Something which handles established connections
3. A main program loop that handles it all

The ACE Acceptor provides a solution for our first requirement. This class is given a TCP/IP port number on which it will listen for incoming connections. When a connection is attempted, the acceptor will create a new object (the handler) to deal with the client connection while the acceptor goes back to listening for other connections.

The ACE EventHandler solves our second requirement. This doesn't seem obvious now but as we progress through this tutorial it will become more clear.

Finally, a simple main() function will provide our program loop. After any program initialization, it will enter an infinite loop which waits for connection attempts to the Acceptor or data "events" on the EventHandler.

Before we continue, I need to introduce one more ACE concept: the Reactor.

I don't want to go into great detail at this time on what the Reactor is, what it does and how it does it but it is necessary for you to understand the basic function of a reactor because it is going to be in the first piece of code you see. The figure below depicts the interrelationships between the Reactor, the Acceptor and the application handler.

Briefly:
The reactor is an object which reacts when things happen to other objects. These things are called events. The other objects are communications objects which you have registered with the reactor. At the time of registration, you also specify which events you are interested in. The reactor is notified by the operating system when the events of interest occur within the registered objects. The reactor then uses member functions of the registered object to process the event. Notice that the reactor doesn't care what happens because of the event. It is the object's responsibility to process the event correctly. The reactor simply notifies the object of the event.

Why use the reactor?

That will become clear as the tutorial progresses. For now, however, a brief answer would be this: it allows multiple simultaneous client connections to be processed efficiently by a single-threaded server.

Servers have traditionally created a separate thread or process for each client served. For large-volume services (such as telnet and ftp) this is appropriate. However, for small-volume services the overhead of process creation far outweighs the actual work being done. So... folks begin using threads instead of processes to handle the clients. This is good also but still, in some cases, the overhead is too much to bear. Instead, why not have a single thread handle several clients and use a more intelligent load-balancing methodology than one-thread-or-process-per-client? Caveat: Handling all requests in one thread of one process is really only good when the requests can be handled almost instantaneously.

This is where the reactor's power and flexibility come into play. The developer can create a simple, single-threaded application that is later modified to thread-per-client, process-per-client or thread-pool solution.

If all of this is gibberish and makes you think that ACE is way to hard to learn, don't worry. We'll go into all the details and explain as we go. I only went into all of this so that it can kick around in the back of your mind until you need it later.

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