Ice Docs

Ice Services Overview

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The Ice core provides a sophisticated client-server platform for distributed application development. However, realistic applications usually require more than just a remoting capability: typically, you also need a way to start servers on demand, distribute proxies to clients, distribute asynchronous events, configure your application, and so on.

Ice ships with a number of services that provide these and other features. The services are implemented as Ice servers to which your application acts as a client.

DataStorm is a data-centric publish/subscribe framework for C++.

Glacier2 allows clients and servers to securely communicate through a firewall without compromising security. Client-server traffic is SSL-encrypted using public key certificates and is bidirectional. Glacier2 offers support for mutual authentication as well as secure session management.

IceBox is an easy-to-use framework for Ice application services.

IceBridge forwards requests from one or more clients to a target server that the clients cannot reach directly.

IceGrid is an implementation of an Ice location service that resolves the symbolic information in an indirect proxy to a protocol-address pair for indirect binding. A location service is only the beginning of IceGrid's capabilities.

IceGrid:

  • allows you to register servers for automatic start-up: instead of requiring a server to be running at the time a client issues a request, IceGrid starts servers on demand, when the first client request arrives.
  • provides tools that make it easy to configure complex applications containing several servers.
  • supports replication and load-balancing.
  • provides a simple query service that allows clients to obtain proxies for objects they are interested in.

IceStorm is a publish-subscribe service that decouples clients and servers. Fundamentally, IceStorm acts as a distribution switch for events. Publishers send events to the service, which, in turn, passes the events to subscribers. In this way, a single event published by a publisher can be sent to multiple subscribers. Events are categorized by topic, and subscribers specify the topics they are interested in. Only events that match a subscriber's topic are sent to that subscriber. The service permits selection of a number of quality-of-service criteria to allow applications to choose the appropriate trade-off between reliability and performance.

IceStorm is particularly useful if you have a need to distribute information to large numbers of application components. (A typical example is a stock ticker application with a large number of subscribers.) IceStorm decouples the publishers of information from subscribers and takes care of the redistribution of the published events. In addition, IceStorm can be run as a federated service, that is, multiple instances of the service can be run on different machines to spread the processing load over a number of CPUs.