Internet Communications Engine

The Internet Communications Engine, or Ice, is an object-oriented middleware that provides object-oriented remote procedure call, grid computing and publish/subscribe functionality developed by ZeroC and dual-licensed under the GNU GPL and a proprietary license. It supports C++, Java, .NET-languages (such as C# or Visual Basic), Objective-C, Python, PHP and Ruby on most major operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X. A light variant of ICE runtime, called Ice-e, may run inside mobile phones. As its name indicates, the middleware may be used for internet applications without the need to use the HTTP protocol and is capable of traversing firewalls unlike most other middleware.