Chapter 34 

The Ice Protocol

34.1 Chapter Overview

The Ice protocol definition consists of three major parts:

• a set of data encoding rules that determine how the various data types are serialized

• a number of message types that are interchanged between client and server, together with rules as to what message is to be sent under what circumstances

• a set of rules that determine how client and server agree on a particular protocol and encoding version

Section 34.2 describes the encoding rules, Section 34.3 describes the various protocol messages, Section 34.4 describes compression, and Section 34.5 explains how the protocol and encoding are versioned and how client and server agree on a common version. (Both encoding and protocol specifications are currently at version 1.0.) Finally, Section 34.6 provides a comparison of the Ice protocol and encoding with those used by CORBA.