White Papers and Articles
White Papers
- Choosing Middleware: Why Performance and Scalability do (and do not) Matter (Feb 2011)
- This white paper compares performance and scalability measurements for Ice, Windows
Communication Foundation, and Java RMI. It also discusses how you can decide which
middleware is right for you, and provides tips and implementation techniques to improve
the performance and scalability of your Ice applications.
The benchmarks used to obtain the results in this article are available in the following source code archives:
Ice-Performance-3.4.1.tar.gz
Ice-Performance-3.4.1.zipAn installation of Ice 3.4.1 is required for building the benchmarks.
- A New Asynchronous Method Invocation API for Ice 3.4 (Jan 2010)
- Ice has had an API for asynchronous method invocation (AMI) since its inception. However, that API is quite verbose, inflexible, and not all that easy to use. With the release of Ice 3.4, ZeroC introduces a new API for asynchronous method invocation that does not suffer from these problems and provides programmers with far more choice as to how they can structure their code. The white papers listed below describe the language mappings for this new API:
Application Design
- Let's Chat! (Dec 2010)
- This two-part series provides an in-depth discussion of the design and implementation of ZeroC's chat demo.
Articles about Ice Published in Industry Magazines
- A New Approach to Object-Oriented Middleware (IEEE Internet Computing, Jan 2004)
- This article provides an overview of Ice and its main features.
- Massively Multiplayer Middleware (ACM Queue, Feb 2004)
- This article describes how Ice was used by an online game with extreme performance and scalability requirements, and how the game requirements influenced the design of Ice.
- Eiskalt Serviert—Verteilte Internet Anwendungen mit Ice (in German)
- This article provides a general overview of application development with Ice, discusses key aspects of the Ice architecture, and provides a few examples of using Ice APIs, and compares Ice with other middleware alternatives.
Other Articles
- The Rise and Fall of CORBA (ACM Queue, Jun 2006)
- This article takes a look at the history of CORBA and examines why CORBA ended up as a little-used niche technology.
- API Design Matters (ACM Queue, May/Jun 2007)
- Bad API design is rampant in the industry, with major impact on the reliability of sofware. This article suggests some changes we need to make, both technical and cultural, in order to overcome the API malaise.