Is there any utility tool to make my configuration job easy?

[GoldenLee]

Dear ZeroC Satff,
I came across Ice by accident when googling some interest documents on distributed programming. Having spent some days looking into it, I'd say it's very well designed communication engine. Hats off to the guys that designed the ICE framework!

I read ICE user's manual, and tested its examples to chew on its yummy. I admit it's an easy-to-use tool I've ever seen. But I couldn't find an easy-to-use tool to help me configure both the client and the sever. Take a simpel "hello" program For example, there are several configuration (or deployment-related) file under its folder \Ice-3.4.1-demos\demo\IceBox\hello, such as config.admin, config.client, config.icebox, and config.service. Must I use one of my favorite text editor tool (notepad on Windows, or vi on Unix/Linux, and etc.) to manually prepare their respective contents? I don't think so. For hello-like simple projects, that's acceptable, but for somewhat complicated projects, that will be a very hard, and more importantly, an error-prone job. So, my question is:

Is there any utility tool to make my configuration job easy?

Sorry for my babyish question. Thanks!

[bernard]

Welcome to our forums, and it's good to hear you like our software!

You always create the configuration files for Ice clients with your favorite text editor (notepad, emacs, vi...).

For Ice servers, especially if you have many servers, you usually do not write their configuration files directly: you use IceGrid to manage these servers (start them, monitor them, replicate them ...), and IceGrid automatically generates the Ice configuration for these servers from your description of these servers.

These IceGrid "server descriptors" can be created in several ways:
- with IceGrid Admin (a Java-based graphical admin tool)
- using XML files
- programmatically, for example, using a Python script that connects to IceGrid

Best regards,
Bernard

[GoldenLee]

Dear Mr. Bernard,
Thank you for your detailed and instructive response. I'm sure as my reading on ZeroC's ebook "Distributed Programming with Ice" proceeds, I'll have a solid knowledge of cool ICE. I wish that some day ICE would play a skeleton role in our future project(s).

Best wishes.
GoldenLee