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Introduction : 1.2 The Internet Communications Engine (Ice)
Copyright © 2003-2009 ZeroC, Inc.

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.

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