ACE is an open-source framework that provides many components and patterns for developing high-performance, distributed real-time and embedded systems. ACE provides powerful, yet efficient abstractions for sockets, demultiplexing loops, threads, synchronization primitives.

TAO (The ACE ORB) is an open-source implementation of a CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB) built using components and patterns in the ACE framework.

CIAO (Component Integrated ACE ORB) is an open-source implementation of the CORBA Component Model (CCM) built on top of TAO.