Building and Installing CIAO

The first thing you should do to install CIAO is to set the environment variable CIAO_ROOT to be $TAO_ROOT/CIAO. Please refer to the ACE installation notes and TAO installation notes for instructions on setting $ACE_ROOT and $TAO_ROOT, respectively. They are needed since CIAO sits on top of ACE+TAO. Compiling ACE+TAO successfully is the first requirement for compiling CIAO.

CIAO is divided into several parts, so different installation/building rules apply to different parts of CIAO.

CIAO core/tools/examples: This part of CIAO include following directories: $CIAO_ROOT/ciao, $CIAO_ROOT/tools, $CIAO_ROOT/examples and all other directories in $CIAO_ROOT except those listed in the two bullets below.
CIDL Compiler: This part of CIAO include $CIAO_ROOT/CCF and $CIAO_ROOT/CIDLC
CIAO Deployment and Assembly Framework: This part of CIAO includes $CIAO_ROOT/DAnCE and is a WIP. DAnCE is an implementation of the new Deployment and Configuration specification. This will eventually replace different pieces in $CIAO_ROOT/ciao and $CIAO_ROOT/tools. Please stay tuned to this webpage for details. We refer, henceforth, to all pieces as CIAO in general. The above two pieces will be referred specifically by their names as CIDLC and DAnCE though they are part of CIAO.

Supported Platforms for CIAO

CIAO should be usable on all platforms that TAO runs on. Please see TAO's installation pages for details

Supported Platforms for CIDLC

CIDLC is supported only on a small subset of platforms. Please refer to this for details on how to build CIDLC.

For Building CIAO CIDLC Compiler

Fully supported, i.e., continually tested and used daily Windows 2000/XP (VC 7.1), Linux(GCC 3.2 or higher)

If you have porting questions or have a problem compiling CIAO with TAO and ACE on the platforms shown above please send email to either ACE Newsgroup or the CIAO mailing list and we'll try to help you fix the problems. You can also submit bug reports and enhancement requests in our bug tracking system.

CIAO can be obtained electronically via the WWW and ftp. CIAO is bundled with the ACE and TAO release. You'll always need the most recent version of ACE and TAO because CIAO tracks changes to ACE and TAO very closely.

Install CIDL Compiler

You can choose to either download the binary cidlc(exe) from here or to build it yourself.

MPC is used to build the CIDL compiler on Linux. The procedure is outlined below.

Open up $ACE_ROOT/bin/MakeProjectCreator/config/global.features and set cidl=1.
Make sure you set cidl=1 in $ACE_ROOT/include/makeinclude/platfrom_macros.GNU.
Install boost_filesystem, boost_regex and Utility Library. For how to do that please see Build.html.
In $CIAO_ROOT/CIDLC run $ACE_ROOT/bin/mwc.pl CIDLC.mwc
In $CIAO_ROOT/CIDLC run make.
Note: The linking time is a bit long (more than 5 Minutes with an Intel XEON 1.90GHZ CPU, please be patient).

There are 2 ways to build the CIDL compiler on Windows:

Use the provided Visual Studio solution/project file. For detail please see Build.html
Use MPC: (Not supported yet)

Install CIAO core/tools/examples

Most of the GNUmakefiles/project files/solution files required to build CIAO are available in the release. If you don't like the configurations used, please feel free to regenerate them using MPC. Please see this for more details.

To build CIAO core/tools/examples:

Make sure ACE and TAO are built.
Make sure all ACE/TAO/etc. generated libs are in $ACE_ROOT/lib. To build CIAO you will need:
- ACE
- TAO
- TAO_IDL
- IFR_Client
- IORTable
- Valuetype
- Security
- ACEXML
Make sure you have cidlc or cidlc.exe in $CIAO_ROOT\bin with the right permission setting (executable).
Generate the Makefile/Solution/Project files and build
For the supported build tools please see MPC manual.
You have to execute the MPC command in the following directories if you only want to build the examples and have a peek at CIAO:
- $CIAO_ROOT/ciao
- $CIAO_ROOT/tools
- $CIAO_ROOT/examples
On Linux: do $ACE_ROOT/bin/mwc.pl at the locations specified above then make.
On Windows/VC6: do %ACE_ROOT%/bin/mwc.pl -type vc6 at the locations specified above then Open the workspace file and build.
On Windows/VC71: do %ACE_ROOT%/bin/mwc.pl -type vc71 at the locations specified above then Open the solution file and build.
Note: You can run mwc.pl at $CIAO_ROOT as long as you don't intend to build CIDL compiler with MPC. If this is the case(default), you can run the mwc.pl command with proper augment once then you can do make at $CIAO_ROOT (Linux) or open the workspace/solution file at $CIAO_ROOT (Windows) to build.

Building CIAO quickly : You can build CIAO quickly by doing the following:

Remove all the GNUmakefiles or project files that are shipped with the release.

Open up $CIAO_ROOT/CIAOTAO.mwc and remove DAnCE from the list.

Run $ACE_ROOT/bin/mwc.pl CIAOTAO.mwc from


   $CIAO_ROOT

Type 'make'

This will build all the required ACE+TAO libraries including CIAO libraries and tools.

Back to the CIAO home page.