The Internet Communications Engine, or Ice, is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

RPC framework developed by ZeroC. It provides SDKs for C++, C#,

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementat ...

Objective-C Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was ...

, PHP, Python,

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and

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, and can run on various operating systems, including

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and Android. Ice implements a proprietary

application layer An application layer is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communication protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communications network. An ''application layer'' abstraction is specified in both the Internet Protocol Su ...

communications protocol, called the Ice protocol, that can run over TCP, TLS, UDP,

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and

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

. As its name indicates, Ice can be suitable for applications that communicate over the Internet, and includes functionality for traversing firewalls.

History

Initially released in February 2003, Ice was influenced by the

Common Object Request Broker Architecture The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sy ...

(CORBA) in its design, and indeed was created by several influential CORBA developers, including

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. However, according to ZeroC, it was smaller and less complex than CORBA because it was designed by a small group of experienced developers, instead of suffering from design by committee. In 2004, it was reported that a game called "Wish" by a company named Mutable Realms used Ice. In 2008, it was reported that Big Bear Solar Observatory had used the software since 2005. The source code repository for Ice is on

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since May 2015.

Components

Ice components include object-oriented remote-object-invocation, replication, grid-computing, failover, load-balancing, firewall-traversals and publish-subscribe services. To gain access to those services, applications are linked to a stub library or assembly, which is generated from a language-independent IDL-like syntax called ''slice''.

IceStorm

is an object-oriented publish-and-subscribe framework that also supports federation and quality-of-service. Unlike other publish-subscribe frameworks such as Tibco Software's Rendezvous or SmartSockets, message content consist of objects of well defined classes rather than of structured text.

IceGrid

is a suite of frameworks that provide object-oriented load balancing, failover, object-discovery and registry services.

IcePatch

facilitates the deployment of ICE-based software. For example, a user who wishes to deploy new functionality and/or patches to several servers may use IcePatch.

Glacier

is a proxy-based service to enable communication through firewalls, thus making ICE an internet communication engine.

IceBox

Icebox is a

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. SOA is a good choice for system integration. By consequence, it is also applied in the field ...

container of executable services implemented in .dll or .so libraries. This is a lighter alternative to building entire executable for every service.

Slice

Slice is a ZeroC-proprietary file format that programmers follow to edit computer-language independent declarations and definitions of classes, interfaces, structures and enumerations. Slice definition files are used as input to the stub generating process. The stub in turn is linked to applications and servers that should communicate with one another based on interfaces and classes as declared/defined by the slice definitions. Apart from CORBA, classes and interfaces support inheritance and abstract classes. In addition, slice provides configuration options in form of macros and attributes to direct the code generation process. An example is the directive to generate a certain STL list template instead of the default, which is to generate a STL vector template.

Notes

External links

* https://github.com/zeroc-ice/ice Inter-process communication Grid computing products Application layer protocols Remote procedure call Object request broker