The ALICE Off-Line Strategy: A Successful Migration to OO

The ALICE Experiment has chosen to start developing its software directly in OO, using the services of the ROOT system, which is ALICE's official candidate for the common LHC framework. This had lead to the definition of a complete environment (AliRoot) where the software developed by the different experimental groups is being integrated. <P>Different test-benches for I/O and Simulation have been set up based on real production code. This allows early assessment of technology, both software and hardware in a realistic production environment. Different codes, such as GEANT3, GEANT4 and FLUKA, or the reconstruction algorithms by the physicists developing the detectors, have been easily integrated in the framework, that has shown to be both evolutive and modular.<P>The ALICE Collaboration has adopted this setup and we are now successfully migrating the users into it. This talk describes the AliRoot environment and its future evolution.