Ice 3.0, a multilanguage, multiplatform middleware solution, has been released.

The most significant addition in Ice 3.0 is IceGrid, which changes the way Ice applications are built and deployed. With support for replication, load balancing, and application distribution, IceGrid provides the tools needed to create scalable grid applications and manage them remotely.

In addition to traditional proprietary licensing models for commercial customers, Ice is also freely available as Open Source under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). You can download the complete Ice source and documentation from http://www.zeroc.com/download.html.

"multiplanguage"? did you just make that up? :-)

anyway, congrats on the 3.0 release. the movement to grid is a sign of a product that is in touch with latest trends while still sticking to tried/tested/proven practices of developing robust and efficient object-oriented middleware. TAO seems to be your only biggest competitor these days.

p.s: if Michi is reading this -- your incorporated company in Australia email ID is bouncing for some reason.

Thank you, and sorry for the typo.

Matthew Newhook wrote a good editorial last month on what choices a developer has to design a complex, high-performance distributed application. Have a look at http://www.zeroc.com/newsletter/issue7.pdf for more info.

Regards,
Marc

P.S. The email problem has been fixed.

Based on the introduction of the manual ,the features of Ice are quite impressive.
=> multiplatform,multilanguage(C++,JAVA,C#,VB,Python) middleware solution !

The introduction of the manual is quite critics of a distributed architecture based on web-services .
Do u have any benchmark or/and ICE's customer story which may support your points.

I don't want to start a new debat about the value of using or not web-services for a distributed architecture.It was discussed previously on TSS.

My question is more in the context of the comments from Ice's team in their documentation.
 
Rgds-Claude

You can find some performance figures at http://www.zeroc.com/performance/index.html. Some of ZeroC's customers are listed at http://www.zeroc.com/customers.html. A brief comparison of Ice and CORBA appears at http://www.zeroc.com/iceVsCorba.html, and a comparison of Ice and WS at http://www.zeroc.com/iceVsSoap.html.

You may also want to check out our newsletters at http://www.zeroc.com/newsletter/index.html. Several of these contain articles and editorials that touch on Ice vs other technologies.

Cheers,

Michi.

Claude,

I'm afraid if I touch the topic Web Services, it will start a big flame war again :) But anyway, here are some links:

A very brief comparison of Web Services and Ice can be found at http://www.zeroc.com/iceVsSoap.html. This page is really very incomplete, and only touches two subjects, performance and ease of use.

Our newsletters have several comments/editorials about Web services. Have a look http://www.zeroc.com/newsletter/, in particular issue number 4. (WARNING: This lead to a long and sometime heated debate about Web services performance. Follow the links for further details.)

Michi's editorial in issue 8 followed an equally controversial debate about so-called "loose coupling."

Regards,
Marc

Thank you Marc and Michi for pinpointing the editorials.
They are very informative and yes quite controversial.

Does ICE support distributed transaction ?

Regards,Claude

No, at this point, Ice does not provide a transaction service. (However, Freeze, which is the persistence service, *is* transactional, with automatic as well as user-controllable transaction boundaries.)

Whether we add a transaction service in the future or not will depend on customer demand. (We certainly know how to do this, having done one for CORBA in the past.)

Cheers,

Michi.

Congratulations!
ICE is the rare occasion when people build and improve upon previous achievements rather than rush to (re)invent wheels and make them square.
I wish you all the best guys!