Ice 3.3 Feature Discussion

[mes]

The announcement describes the notable new features and changes you can expect to see in the upcoming release of Ice 3.3. This thread is where you can post questions or comments about the release.

Please be aware that the development phase of Ice 3.3 is already nearing completion, so if your favorite "wish list" feature is not present in the announcement, it is very unlikely it would appear in Ice 3.3.

A beta release of Ice 3.3 will precede the production release. Watch the announcements forum for a release notice.

As always, we value your feedback, so please let us know what you think.

[andreynech]

Hi Folks,

I was really glad to read about UDP multicast support in the upcomming version. As it is mentioned in announcement, one possible usage of it is the service discovery. It would be interesting for me to discuss this topic a little more and hear what other ICE users and developers think about it.

In my project we also want to reduce the number of places where the host name or IP address should be mentioned explicitly. For this purposes we looked at UPnP (Welcome to the UPnP™ Forum!) and ZeroConf (Networking - Bonjour Avahi - Trac ) technologies. Our goal was to find the way to publish/discover arbitrary ICE proxy string and notify the application when corresponding server started or disappeared.

We decide for ZeroConf since it provide reacher functionality. Among other functionality, ZeroConf allows not only discover the services but also made the necessary previous step - establish proper IP configuration even without DHCP (scenario like simply connecting two notebooks with crossover cable). Integration with DNS is also nice feature if services need to be published in Internet.

We implement two pretty simple classes with AVAHI API (Linux) to perform publish and discovery tasks. They are simple and non-intrusive, i.e. notification loop is running in own thread and default reaction on discovered services is doing nothing. I will be glad to share this implementation if somebody is interested.

So the question I would like to discuss is whether it make sense to try to convince ZeroC folks to integrate certain discovery technology with Ice ? In particular, it might make sense for "standard" Ice services to prevent clients from specifying concrete location. Certain user applications might also benefit from this functionality in case of add-hoc environment. There are also disadvantages like the need to bundle Ice distribution with corresponding libraries and functionality which is not always used. However, it might be possible to implement it as an optional feature similar to getline usage.

Since I am personally not quite sure whether it is a good idea or not, I would be glad to hear opinions from other Ice users and developers.

Thank you,
Andrey.

[matthew]

Hi Andrey,

Thanks very much for your feedback. Ice 3.3 will include a discovery service demo that uses the new UDP multi-cast support. It is not directly integrated into the Ice core, however. It is definitely not possible to make any significant changes to the services or feature list for Ice 3.3. However, for Ice 3.4 we are certainly open to suggestions for new features -- such as tighter integration with a discovery service.

As always our needs are driven by the needs of our users I would recommend first looking at what Ice 3.3 offers once it has been released and then re-opening this discussion in a separate thread at that point if you feel future action is necessary.

Regards, Matthew

[paolo]

In the announcement you write:

Desupporting Java2

Ice for Java 3.3 continues to support the Java2 language mapping but requires Java5 or later as the compiler and run time environment.

Could you please elaborate on the compile-time and run-time requirements? We are currently evalutaing the use of Ice on Linux/MIPS with Skelmir CEEJ4: a Java 1.4 compliant with some (but not all) features from Java5.

Which Java5 language features are used in Ice 3.3?

Thanks,
Paul

[mes]

Originally Posted by paolo

Could you please elaborate on the compile-time and run-time requirements? We are currently evalutaing the use of Ice on Linux/MIPS with Skelmir CEEJ4: a Java 1.4 compliant with some (but not all) features from Java5.

Which Java5 language features are used in Ice 3.3?

The Ice run time implementation will make use of language features such as generics, as well as APIs that were introduced in Java5. This means the Ice for Java source code cannot be compiled with a Java2 compiler, nor will it execute in a Java2 environment. The Slice compiler will continue to support the Java2 mapping for backward source compatibility with Ice applications that still use this mapping.

If your application requires a Java2 environment, you can continue to use Ice 3.2; just keep in mind that we only support the most recent release here on the forum. Full support for previous releases is provided to customers that purchase a support contract.

Take care,
- Mark

[paolo]

Which level of interoperability will be possible between Ice 3.2 Clients and Ice 3.3 Servers? In detail my clients are written in java 2 language and server in c++

[marc]

There have been no changes in the Ice protocol, so Ice 3.3 is compatible with all previously released Ice versions, including Ice 3.2. (Even if there would be a protocol change, we would make sure that it's backwards compatible.)

[kwaclaw]

Originally Posted by mes

As always, we value your feedback, so please let us know what you think.

Assuming that the core ICE for .NET/C# assembly will still have native interop code (so that it cannot run in partially trusted environments), it would be nice if a compile option could be added to exclude those parts that contain unsafe code. This might be possible given that not all of the code is essential (e.g. the Application class and BZip2 compression) and the rest might have already been converted to managed code (at least the pointer code in the BasicStream class).

Karl

[borax00]

Hi Guys,

One thing that we've struggled with for a while is feedback during the process of patching applications using IceGrid (see this thread: FileParser unusable outside icegridadmin)

Are there improvements planned for Ice v3.3?


Thanks,

Alex

[benoit]

Hi Alex,

No, there's been no changes in this area, improving IceGrid patching is still on our TODO list!

Cheers,
Benoit.

[pgquiles]

Does ICE 3.3 include any of my changes to make it build with MinGW (gcc on Windows)? Changes are mostly to the makefiles but some of them apply to the source.

(Thread about MinGW support, including the patch: Does ice support MinGW?)

[mes]

Hi Karl,

Originally Posted by kwaclaw

it would be nice if a compile option could be added to exclude those parts that contain unsafe code.

We'll have a compile option in the 3.3 release.

Take care,
- Mark

[mwilson]

Hello,

Will there be other changes to IceStorm, such as event persistence or filtering?

Mark

[benoit]

Hi Mark,

No, the addition of replication and persistent subscribers are the only two main new features for IceStorm.

Cheers,
Benoit.

[cala]

Originally Posted by mes

A beta release of Ice 3.3 will precede the production release. Watch the announcements forum for a release notice.

Hello

Could you reveal any hints when Ice 3.3 will be available? I look forward to using it with VS 2008.

Regards,