History of ICE ?

[ChMeessen]

Hello,

I was looking for some information on ICE history. When, who and how was it developed ?

I couldn't find a clear reference on its age.

Another information I would be interested in is to get an idea of the user base. How many people are using ICE for production with some short info on the application scale.

Is it also possible to get some info on ZeroC ? I couldn't find a clear information on the geographical location of ZeroC company ? Is it american ? Ausralian ?

[marc]

ZeroC employs the following individuals:

Marc Laukien: President and Founder of ZeroC, and co-author of several CORBA ORBs. He wrote and designed the initial version of Ice for C++.

Michi Henning: Chief Scientist of ZeroC, co-author of several CORBA ORBs and the CORBA "bible" "Advanced CORBA Programming with C++". Michi was also very active in the OMG standardization process. He co-authored several specifications, and served as a member of the OMG's architecture board.

Matthew Newhook: Middleware specialist, co-author of several CORBA ORBs, implemented a CORBA Notification Service, and several other services, and was also an active participant at the OMG.

Mark Spruiell: Middleware specialist, co-authored several CORBA ORBs, implemented a Trading Service, as well as the initial versions of Ice for Java and Ice for PHP.

Bernard Normier: Middleware and database specialist, took over the development of Freeze. Was also very active in the CORBA community and co-authored a CORBA ORB, as well as several OMG specifications.

Benoit Foucher: All-around middleware talent, co-authored several CORBA ORBs and services, worked on IcePack and IceBox.

The first version of Ice was released early 2003. ZeroC is well-funded, and its mission is to become the leader in "technical middleware". Our core product "Ice" can be viewed like "CORBA on steroids", or "CORBA done right": It provides more features than CORBA, but is much cleaner and easier to use. Ice is here to provide an alternative to aging CORBA products.

At present, many companies, ranging from small start-ups to large multi-national corporations are using Ice for product development. Unfortunately, we cannot disclose the names of these companies at this point in time.

ZeroC is a US corporation.

[CatOne]

Ice is but a young pup... It was released earlier this year (February or March?).

Of course, the developers of Ice have a long and successful history in developing distributed OO frameworks... previously they wrote ORBacus, which was the best CORBA ORB I've used.

As for company, they're on the distributed side. Newfoundland, Canada, Boston, Florida, California, Australia... maybe more locations