This section provides some guidance for developers that are planning to distribute an Ice-based application. We can start by listing items that typically should
not be included in your binary distribution:
Each of the language mappings is discussed in its own subsection below. In the following discussion, we use the term
library to refer to a shared library or DLL as appropriate for the platform.
The Ice library contains the implementation of the core Ice run time. Supplemental libraries provide the stubs and skeletons for the Ice services, as well as utility functions used by Ice, its services, and Ice applications:
The IceUtil library is a dependency of the
Ice library and therefore must be distributed with any Ice application. The
IceXML library is required by certain Ice services.
Your distribution needs to include only those libraries that your application uses. If your application implements an IceBox service, you must also distribute the IceBox server executable (
icebox).
On Windows, you can use the dumpbin utility in a command window to display the dependencies of a DLL or executable. For example, here is the output for the
glacier2router executable:
We can deduce from the names of the Microsoft Visual C++ run time DLLs that this Ice installation was compiled with Visual Studio 2008. Note that each of these DLLs has its own dependencies, which can be inspected using additional
dumpbin commands. However, tracking down the dependencies recursively through each DLL can quickly become tedious, therefore you should consider using the Dependency Walker
1 graphical utility instead.
On Unix, the ldd utility displays the dependencies of shared libraries and executables.
The Ice assembly contains the implementation of the core Ice run time. Supplemental assemblies provide the stubs and skeletons for the Ice services:
Your distribution needs to include only those assemblies that your application uses. If your application implements an IceBox service, you must also distribute the IceBox server executable (
iceboxnet.exe).
On Mono, the file Ice.dll.config provides a mapping for the Bzip2 DLL. If your application does not use Ice’s protocol compression feature, you do not need to distribute this file. Otherwise, you should include the file and verify that its mapping is appropriate for your target platform.
The Ice for Java run time (Ice.jar) contains the following components:
If your application uses Freeze, you must also distribute Freeze.jar along with the Berkeley DB run time libraries and JAR file.
In addition, your distribution should include the source code generated for your own Slice files, or the Slice files themselves if your application loads them dynamically.
