ACE 5.6 was released at the beginning of this month. This release was achieved after much hard work by many people at Remedy IT, Riverace, Vanderbilt University, and many ACE contributors. The February , March, April, May, June, July, and August newsletters contained a series of articles looking at the new and changed features in ACE 5.6. If you're a new subscriber, please review the previous articles for information that may affect you.

Although our series of articles described the most visible items in ACE 5.6, all user-visible changes to ACE are described in the ACE_wrappers/NEWS file of each ACE release. You can also review that file here.

To download your copy of ACE 5.6, please visit the Downloads page at www.riverace.com.

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!

Under Riverace's standard ACE support service, the supported ACE versions are the current and previous versions. Therefore, now that ACE 5.6 is available, the supported versions are now ACE 5.5 and 5.6. ACE 5.4 is no longer be supported under standard support terms.

End of ACE 5.4 support also marked the end of support for platforms having a "Last support version" of ACE 5.4 (you can view the complete support matrix at www.riverace.com/support.htm). The following platforms are no longer supported:

• Solaris 8, SPARC, all compilers
• Red Hat Linux 7.x, x86, g++
• Red Hat Linux 8, x86, g++
• Red Hat Linux 9, x86, g++
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, x86, g++

If you require these platforms to remain supported for later ACE versions, or you require an extension of ACE 5.4 support, please contact me to discuss extended service options for your environment.

Riverace's President, Steve Huston, gave a class at the "Software Development: Best Practices 2007" conference in Boston on September 20. The attendees came ready to hear more about why it's important and beneficial to contribute to open source projects, as well as how to work most effectively with the project's team. They also came with questions - it's clear that open source software activity is increasing as more companies learn the benefits that accrue from using and contributing to open source efforts.

The classes at SDBP were recorded and will be made available as soon as the conference's organizer, CMP Media, produces the recordings and synchronizes the audio to the slides. I'll note the availability of these on www.riverace.com as soon as the content is available.