ACE Tutorial 005
On the road to a multithreaded server

Now, let's take a look at client_acceptor.h. Since I went on about how it does all the work of letting clients connect to us, it must be rather complex. Right? Wrong.

The more you use ACE, the more you'll find that they've already taken care of most details for you. With respect to the acceptance of client connections: there just aren't that many ways to do it! The ACE team has chosen an approach and created a C++ template that does all of the work for you. All you're required to do is provide it with an object type to instantiate when a new connection arrives.

    // $Id: page03.html,v 1.9 1999/04/03 21:56:24 jcej Exp $

    #ifndef CLIENT_ACCEPTOR_H
    #define CLIENT_ACCEPTOR_H

    /* The ACE_Acceptor<> template lives in the ace/Acceptor.h header
       file. You'll find a very consitent naming convention between the
       ACE objects and the headers where they can be found.  In general,
       the ACE object ACE_Foobar will be found in ace/Foobar.h.  */

    #include "ace/Acceptor.h"

    #if !defined (ACE_LACKS_PRAGMA_ONCE)
    # pragma once
    #endif /* ACE_LACKS_PRAGMA_ONCE */

    /* Since we want to work with sockets, we'll need a SOCK_Acceptor to
       allow the clients to connect to us.  */
    #include "ace/SOCK_Acceptor.h"

    /* The Client_Handler object we develop will be used to handle clients
       once they're connected.  The ACE_Acceptor<> template's first
       parameter requires such an object.  In some cases, you can get by
       with just a forward declaration on the class, in others you have to
       have the whole thing.  */
    #include "client_handler.h"

    /* Parameterize the ACE_Acceptor<> such that it will listen for socket
       connection attempts and create Client_Handler objects when they
       happen. In Tutorial 001, we wrote the basic acceptor logic on our
       own before we realized that ACE_Acceptor<> was available.  You'll
       get spoiled using the ACE templates because they take away a lot of
       the tedious details!  */
    typedef ACE_Acceptor <Client_Handler, ACE_SOCK_ACCEPTOR> Client_Acceptor;

    #endif /* CLIENT_ACCEPTOR_H */

[Tutorial Index] [Continue This Tutorial]