It is against this unpleasant background of choices that ZeroC, Inc. decided to
develop the Internet Communications Engine, or Ice for short.
1
The main design
goals of Ice are:
• Provide an object-oriented middleware platform suitable for use in heteroge-
neous environments.
• Provide a full set of features that support development of realistic distributed
applications for a wide variety of domains.
• Avoid unnecessary complexity, making the platform easy to learn and to use.
• Provide an implementation that is efficient in network bandwidth, memory
use, and CPU overhead.
• Provide an implementation that has built-in security, making it suitable for use
over insecure public networks.
To be more simplistic, the Ice design goals could be stated as “Let’s build a
middleware platform that is more powerful than CORBA, without making all of
CORBA’s mistakes.”
