Internet Communications Engine

The Internet Communications Engine (Ice) is a complete RPC framework that helps you build networked applications with minimal effort. Ice allows you to focus your efforts on your application logic, and it takes care of all interactions with low-level network programming interfaces. With Ice, there is no need to worry about details such as opening network connections, serializing and deserializing data for network transmission, or retrying failed connection attempts. Remote procedure calls ([RPCs][rpcs]) are at the heart of the Ice framework. 1. Define the contract between your client and your server with the [Slice][slice] language—Ice's [IDL][idl]. 2. Run the Slice compiler on these Slice definitions to generate stubs in the programming language(s) of your choice. You can use any supported programming language for your client and server. For example, a Python client could call a C++ server; neither side knows the programming language used by the other side. The Ice framework provides everything you need to build networked applications: RPCs with a compact binary [protocol][protocol] over a variety of network transports (TCP, SSL, UDP, WebSocket, Bluetooth...) Configuration ([Ice Properties][properties]) Logging ([Ice Logger][logger]) Instrumentation and metrics ([IceMX][icemx]) Pub-sub ([IceStorm][icestorm], [DataStorm][datastorm]) Server deployment, replication and monitoring ([IceGrid][icegrid]) Application gateway ([Glacier2][glacier2]) The Ice software itself remains the same: the only difference between an open-source Ice and a commercial Ice are the license terms.