1.2 The Internet Communications Engine (Ice)

It is against this unpleasant background of choices that ZeroC, Inc. decided to develop the Internet Communications Engine, or Ice for short.¹ The main design goals of Ice are:

• Provide an object-oriented middleware platform suitable for use in heterogeneous environments.

• Provide a full set of features that support development of realistic distributed applications for a wide variety of domains.

• Avoid unnecessary complexity, making the platform easy to learn and to use.

• Provide an implementation that is efficient in network bandwidth, memory use, and CPU overhead.

• Provide an implementation that has built-in security, making it suitable for use over insecure public networks.

To be more simplistic, the Ice design goals could be stated as "Let’s build a middleware platform that is more powerful than CORBA, without making all of CORBA’s mistakes."

---

1

The acronym "Ice" is pronounced as a single syllable, like the word for frozen water.