Ice and its various subsystems are configured by properties. A property is a name–value pair, for example:
Note that Ice reads properties that control the Ice run time and its services (that is, properties that start with one of the reserved prefixes, such as
Ice,
Glacier2, etc.) only once on start-up, when you create a communicator. This means that you must set Ice-related properties to their correct values
before you create a communicator. If you change the value of an Ice-related property after that point, it is likely that the new setting will simply be ignored.
This two- or three-part naming scheme is by convention only—if you use properties to configure your own applications, you can use property names with any number of categories.
Ice reserves properties with the prefixes Ice,
IceBox,
IceGrid,
IcePatch2,
IceSSL,
IceStorm,
Freeze, and
Glacier2. You cannot use a property beginning with one of these prefixes to configure your own application.
Note that there is no special significance to a period in a property name. (Periods are used to make property names more readable and are not treated specially by the property parser.)
Property names cannot contain leading or trailing white space. (If you create a property name with leading or trailing white space, that white space is silently stripped.)