Internet communications engine
The Internet Communications Engine ( Ice ) is a remote procedure call and object-oriented middleware system that was developed by ZeroC. Ice represents an alternative to CORBA and the COM / DCOM developed by Microsoft . The aim of this implementation is to enable applications to communicate with one another in different programming languages and on different platforms without the details of the interprocess communication for client and server being known. The engine is under a dual license (GNU GPL and a proprietary license) and supports C ++ , C # , Objective-C , Java , Python , Ruby , PHP , and Visual Basic .