The Distributed Object Computing (DOC) Group is a distributed research consortium lead by Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt and consisting of the DOC group in ISIS at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, the Center for Distributed Object Computing in the Computer Science department at Washington University and the Laboratory for Distributed Object Computing in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the University of California, Irvine. The DOC Group also includes members at Siemens ZT, University of Maryland, Remedy IT, Riverace Corporation, PrismTech, and LMCO-ATL, Object Computing Inc, Qualcomm, Hewlett-Packard, and Automated Trading Desk. The purpose of the DOC group is to support advanced R&D on patterns, middleware, and modeling tools using an open source software development model, which allows academics, developers, and end-users to participate in leading-edge R&D projects driven by the free market of ideas, requirements, and resources.

The most popular and widely used open-source middleware platforms and modeling tools developed by DOC group focus on distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems and include: 

• ACE, which provides a rich set of reusable C++ wrapper facades and framework components that perform common communication software tasks across a range of OS platforms.
• TAO, which is CORBA middleware that allows clients to invoke operations on distributed objects without concern for object location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols and interconnects, and hardware.
• CIAO, which is a real-time CORBA Component Model (CCM) implementation built on top of TAO.
• DAnCE, which is the Deployment And Configuration Engine built on top of CIAO that implements the OMG Deployment and Configuration Specification.
• ZEN, which is an implementation of Real-time CORBA implemented using Real-time Java.
• CoSMIC, which is a collection of domain-specific modeling languages and their associated analysis/synthesis tools developed using the Generic Modeling Environment (GME) to support various phases of DRE system development, assembly, deployment, configuration, and quality assurance.
• JAWS, which is a high-performance HTTP web server.
• RACE, which is the Resource Allocation and Control Engine built on top of CIAO that allocates resource (such as memory, computational power, network bandwidth, etc,) and manages application QoS and system resource utilization in various operating conditions by performing necessary control actions.
• Skoll, which is a Distributed Continuous Quality Assurance environment 
• DDS Benchmark, which investigates the performance of pub/sub data distribution service

You can download all the source-code, documentation, regression tests, and example applications for these middleware platforms and tools here. You can download a list of the projects we're currently working on here.