What is Ice-E?
Ice-E ("Embedded Ice") is a compact communications engine designed specifically for use in environments where resources are scarce, such as Internet-enabled smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and embedded controllers.Advantages
Here are some of the compelling reasons to choose Ice-E for your next project:
- Reduced Time to Market
Considering the constraints imposed on embedded applications, it can often be tempting to build your own communications infrastructure. In some cases, such as when the underlying technologies are highly specialized, this may be your only choice. But if your target platforms are suitable for Ice-E, your project will save time and money using our highly-optimized communications engine, crafted by engineers with decades of experience in the field. Ice-E is a fast, reliable and efficient tool to help you deliver a better product sooner.
- Ease of Use
Ice-E provides a natural application programming interface (API) that makes developers instantly comfortable and productive. Designed for the "developer in the trenches," the API is easy to learn and use, leveraging the best practices and idioms of each target language.
- Portability
The benefits of Ice-E's portability have an immediate and long-lasting impact on developer productivity and product reliability. Ice-E insulates developers from the low-level details of network communications, hiding the differences between machine architectures, networking APIs, and operating systems. Developers write less code to implement their communications requirements, and instead focus their energies on completing the application in less time or adding more functionality. Ice-E's highly portable source code, written in industry-standard programming languages, speeds up the development cycle by allowing applications and components to be written and tested in the development environment.
- Speed
Since Ice-E originated as a subset of the Ice product, Ice-E has inherited a highly-efficient runtime. The performance characteristics that have made Ice a market-leading middleware solution apply equally well to Ice-E.
Features
Ice-E offers a wealth of features in a compact and efficient runtime:
- C++ and Java language mappings
- Efficient resource utilization
- Multiplexed connections for improved scalability
- Bidirectional connections for NAT/firewall traversal
- Replaceable TCP/IP transport
- Portable C++ APIs for threading and synchronization primitives
Please see our Ice and Ice-E feature comparison for more details.