Communicator

The main entry point into the Ice API is the Communicator class, and a communicator is simply an instance of this class. Its primary responsibility is to create outgoing connections, and to maintain a cache of the outgoing connections it created. A communicator has many additional responsibilities, to the point you can see it as the “central” Ice object.

A communicator serves as the registry and owner for:

• Outgoing connections
  A communicator maintains a cache of outgoing connections.

• Configuration properties
  Various aspects of the Ice runtime can be configured via properties. Each communicator has its own set of such configuration properties.

• Logger object
  A logger object implements the Logger abstraction and determines how log messages that are produced by the Ice runtime are handled.

• Object adapters
  Object adapters dispatch incoming requests and take care of passing each request to the correct servant.

• Client-side thread pool
  The client-side thread pool is used to process messages received from outgoing connections.

and much more.

Most Ice-based applications create and use a single communicator, although it is possible and occasionally desirable to have multiple Communicator objects in the same program.