Long Term Plans For Ice?

[Ken Carpenter]

I'm curious what your long-term plans are for Ice.

Do you intend to position it as a replacement for CORBA?

Would like to see an Ice industry spring up similar to the ORB industry around CORBA, or do you plan to keep Ice more proprietary?

Any plans for standardization?

Thanks,


Ken Carpenter

[marc]

We do certainly not want to keep Ice proprietary. If this were our plan, we wouldn't have made the source available, so that everybody can look at the internals. We will also publish a draft chapter that describes our protocol very shortly.

We believe that Ice can be a CORBA replacement in the long-term. Ultimately, it will be up to the users to decide, by either embracing Ice or sticking with CORBA. This can certainly not happen overnight, as it will take some time for Ice to develop mind-share. This is also our most important goal for next years: To actively promote the use of Ice in both open source and closed source projects. So expect to see lots of ZeroC conference talks and papers in the future

As for standardization: We would certainly support this, but it might still be a little bit too early.

[rodrigc]

What conferences would you be targeting? OMG conferences?
Academic conferences? Other?

While I think that Ice looks like pretty good stuff, I am worried about
its general prospects, given the general climate of the IT sector.

In the past 8 years, with the rise of the Web and also the concerns about upgrading systems for Y2K, there were many opportunities
to introduce new software technologies and get them accepted and deployed, even
if they were rough around the edges (or even half-baked!). Look at al the web products,
things Linux, etc. that sprouted in the past 8 years as a result, and were refined over time
after they grabbed some market share.

These days, IT budgets are getting slashed and managers are very hesitant to put any resources into new and unproven technologies, even if they are very good.

I hope that Ice can survive, even in this climate.

[marc]

We have a long breath

Besides, we already got a lot of commercial requests, including requests from large companies. Many of them said that they cannot use Ice right now, but that it is a top contender for their next project, or even the next iteration of existing projects.

Ice was just released a few weeks ago, so it would be unreasonable to expect that large companies dump whatever they use in their current projects immediately, and switch to Ice.

However, based on the email exchange I had with several companies in the last weeks, I'm pretty certain that it will be used in upcoming projects. The message I get from these emails always seems to be that they are currently having a lot of pain using existing technical middleware, but nevertheless they can't switch immediately to Ice because of certain milestones which they first have to complete.

As for upcoming conferences, we will soon announce where and when we will have talks about Ice.