What feature would you like to see most in Ice?

[jschreud]

Hey there;

I work as a systems engineer at a bank down Wall Street and I am a newbie to ICE. First, may I say congratulations! I have been playing with the example programs and I have been very impressed with all that ICE has to offer.

It would be nice if there was a java library that supports the JMS interface but uses ICE on the backend. This would be very attractive to many products which have a significant java code base using JMS but whom are unhappy with the performance scalability and stability of the middleware systems. It would be a no brainer to show the management of these products the performance numbers ICE brings to the table and then offer them an uprade strategy that has one middleware system being replaced with ICE, without having to rewrite the java code that is already there.

Just a suggestion. Once again guys, I love ICE and I continue to promote it whenever and wherever I can. Thanks!

PS. Another suggestion, devote a webpage or pdf to just sample code. The manual is very well written but not something I want to lug on the number 6 train home in the evening. Maybe something along the lines of the Cookbook series from O'Reilly?

John

[marc]

Originally Posted by jschreud

PS. Another suggestion, devote a webpage or pdf to just sample code. The manual is very well written but not something I want to lug on the number 6 train home in the evening. Maybe something along the lines of the Cookbook series from O'Reilly?

Did you have a look at our newsletter? Our newsletter has many examples, covering various Ice topics.

[jschreud]

Oh, I forgot about the newsletters. Yes, those are extremely helpful! I especially liked the article on integrating ICE into a multithreaded GUI app. I guess what I was talking about is taking the newsletter, drop the news part and put the code somewhere folks can easily search for it. A good example I can think of is what Syncfusion (www.syncfusion.com) did on their support site. Syncfusion makes .NET GUI widgets and confused folks such as myself can go to the support page and search the knowledge base for FAQ's. I dunno, I think it could really help you guys as a first line of support.

John

[Mako]

A nice feature would be support for .net 2.0 in the latest release.

Do you guys have any tentative dates for support c# on vs2005?

[bernard]

The next Ice release will support .NET 2.0. It's already working on our mainline. However, we did not announce a date for this release yet.

Cheers,
Bernard

[xdm]

I have a small suggestions for icegridadmin command tool
you can add a option for server restart instead of stopt start.

[g00fy]

What I would like to see is if a property is set or not... Right now it's not possible to have like
"if property 'Cat.House' is not set -> Take 'Animal.House'". This is OK for as long as Cat.House is not empty. Then you can say like 'ok, take the animal house'. But what if it is intentionally empty? Then it will take the animal house, but that's a wrong behaviour...

My opinion would be to add "bool isPropertySet( string prop )" to the Properties object.


Greetings,
Steven

[g00fy]

Something else what would be interesting is for example: RWRecMutex::RWLock in such a way that when you initiate it, it is a RLock, but you can upgrade() it to a WLock...

[michi]

RWRecMutex has an upgrade() method that allows you to do just that. See page 679 in the manual.

Cheers,

Michi.

[g00fy]

I know, but I'm using the RLock/WLock typdefs... Which has not this function (afaik).

So I made a RWLock:

class RWLock
{
public:
  RWLock(IceUtil::RWRecMutex& _mutex)
  : m_mutex(_mutex),
    rlock(_mutex) // automatically readlocking...
  {
  }

  ~RWLock()
  {
  }

  void upgrade()
  {
    m_mutex.upgrade();
  }

  void downgrade( )
  {
    m_mutex.downgrade();
  }

private:
  IceUtil::RWRecMutex& m_mutex;
  IceUtil::RWRecMutex::RLock rlock;

  RWLock();
  RWLock(const RWLock&);
  RWLock& operator=(const RWLock&);
};

But it would be nice to see it native in ICE

[michi]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If you have a RWRecMutex and you use the RLock typedef, you can still upgrade:

RWRecMutex m;

// ...

RWRecMutex::RLock lock(m);

// m is now locked for reading.
// ...

m.upgrade();

// M is now locked for writing.

Cheers,

Michi.

[g00fy]

OMG!!!! so easy I forgot that!

[hughperkins]

Question: is there any reason why we couldnt envisage implementing a reliable UDP protocol?

The advantage of reliable UDP wrt TCP is that there is no requirement for packets to be received in sequence, so a single lost packet wont delay the packets that go after it.

One way to implement this could be to use http://www.lidgren.net/wiki/doku.php...ibrary.network

Hugh Perkins
OpenSource Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net

[marc]

There is no reason not to implement a reliable UDP transport protocol, but Ice is not the right abstraction level for this. Ice uses existing transport protocols (TCP, UDP, SSL), but doesn't try to add new transport protocols.

[hughperkins]

Marc,

Yes you are right. As you say implementing a new transport layer within ICE itself would not be a Good Thing.

How easy would it be to add a new transport layer as a plugin, ie without recompiling the ICE library itself?