ZeroC Labs
ZeroC Labs is a breeding ground for new ideas and technologies that we come up with. The projects we make available here are very much experimental in nature: while they are beyond the "proof of concept" stage, they are are not finished products, with little documentation, and they are not as rigorously tested as our commercial software releases.
The purpose of providing early access to these projects is to allow us (and you) to "test the waters". ZeroC Labs projects give you an opportunity to try out our latest ideas. That way, you gain early access to new technology, and you can influence its development direction with your feedback. In turn, this helps us to avoid building something that misses the mark or lacks features. In other words, ZeroC Labs projects exist to make sure that, if we turn a project into a finished product, that product will meet your needs and provide the functionality you asked for.
A ZeroC Labs project, depending on your feedback, may not become a finished product—the whole point of these projects is to improve or discard ideas before they are cast in concrete.
When we say ZeroC Labs projects are "experimental", we mean just that—they are not ready for prime time and you should not use them in production environments. But, if you have an appetite for the cutting edge of middleware, are not afraid to ask questions and criticize what we have done, and can tolerate the occasional bug, ZeroC Labs projects are for you!
Ice for Android
Just to show that we don't play favorites, we've cooked up a release of Ice for Java that works beautifully on Google's Android platform. With only minor exceptions, this Ice run time has the same capabilities as Ice 3.3. We have also created several sample clients that will guide you in writing your own Android programs with Ice. So take Ice for Android for a spin — and let us know what you think.
Ice for Silverlight
Ice for Silverlight was our first ZeroC Labs project. It allows you to communicate with Ice servers directly from inside a web browser, using the same elegant APIs as Ice for .NET.
For more information, including download options, please visit the Ice for Silverlight home page.
Protocol Buffers
Google's Protocol Buffers tool kit provides a compact serialization format with a simple definition language and support for C++, Java, and Python. As a ZeroC Labs project, we have developed a patch for Ice that adds support for Protocol Buffers to our C++, Java, and Python language mappings. Please visit the project's home page for more information.