This issue continues our look at what's coming up in the ACE 5.6 release. The February , March, April, May, and June newsletters also contained articles in this series looking at what's coming in the next ACE release, ACE 5.6. If you're a new subscriber, please review the previous articles for information that may affect you.

This article is the sixth in the "What's Coming" series and we'll continue until ACE 5.6 is released (scheduled for late August or early September). As with the previous articles, we note that all user-visible changes to ACE are described in the ACE_wrappers/NEWS file of each ACE beta as development progresses. You can review that file here.

This article describes two changes to existing functionality that were made in the most recent beta, ACE 5.5.10. Please review these changes to determine if they will have any impact on your applications.

1. ACE_utsname struct
2. ACE_INET_Addr and IPv6

The ACE_utsname struct, used in the ACE_OS::uname() function when the platform doesn't provide the standard utsname struct, was changed. It defines a number of text fields and their types were changed from ACE_TCHAR[] to char[] in order to be consistent with all other platforms. This change removes the need to write different code for platforms where ACE_LACKS_UTSNAME_T is set and that have wide characters.

Windows is the most prominent platform affected by the ACE_utsname change. In particular, if your application uses ACE_OS::utsname() and you build with wide-characters enabled (ACE_USES_WCHAR defined), you will need to change your access to these fields to expect narrow characters.

The second change that may have a run-time affect on your applications is a change to ACE_INET_Addr::set (u_short port, char *host_name, ...). This method now favors IPv6 addresses when compiled with ACE_HAS_IPV6 defined and the supplied address family is AF_UNSPEC. This means that if host_name has an IPv6 address in DNS or /etc/hosts, that will be used over an IPv4 address. If no IPv6 address exists for host_name, then its IPv4 address will be used. The previous behavior was ad-hoc ordering/preference depending on platform. This change unifies disparate behavior across platforms.

If you want to experiment with these changes before ACE 5.6 is released, grab a copy of the latest ACE beta and try it out! If you get stuck or have questions, our new Whitewater Level of ACE support can help you get going quickly.

Riverace has a new ACE platform sponsorship program designed to get ACE up and running great on more of today's new computing platforms at a lower cost to you. This program helps you get ACE tested on your favorite new platforms and can save you lots of money in the process.

Before this program, the ACE user community needed to wait until a single company wanted ACE ported to a new platform enough to pay the entire cost to port, test, and qualify ACE on a new platform. Many companies have born the burden for dozens of ACE ports over the years, and we are all very thankful for their foresight and investment.

Now, though, there's an even better way to get ACE up and running on new platforms. Riverace's new ACE platform sponsorship program can coordinate funding for new platforms across a number of sponsors, speeding up the porting process, and lowering the cost to support new ACE platforms. Everyone wins!