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The Internet Communications Engine
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Ice is a comprehensive RPC framework that helps you build distributed
applications with minimal effort using familiar object-oriented idioms.
Ice handles all interactions with low-level network programming
interfaces so that you can focus your efforts on your application logic.
When using Ice, there is no need to worry about details such as opening
network connections, serializing and deserializing data for network
transmission, or retrying failed connection attempts (just to name a
few things).

Feature highlights:

- Efficient, high-performance binary protocol
- Supports a wide range of programming languages and platforms
- Easy to use and type-safe API, with your own interfaces and types
  defined in a programming language neutral IDL, Slice
- Supports secure, encrypted communications by taking advantage of
  your platform's native SSL/TLS stack
- Familiar object-oriented programming model, with the ability to
  transmit proxies (references to remote objects) to remote applications
- Supports synchronous and asynchronous calls, for both client-side
  invocations and server-side dispatches
- Automatic discovery of remote objects through UDP multicast
- Comes with a number of optional services:
   - IceGrid, the nerve-center of any large-scale application, with
     support for server deployment, replication, monitoring,
     load-balancing and more
   - IceStorm, a lightweight topic-based pub-sub service
   - Freeze, an embedded, transactional database for Ice datatypes
   - Glacier2, a sysadmin-friendly solution for routing Ice
     communications through firewalls
   - IcePatch2, an efficient software distribution and patching service


Getting Started with Ice on Linux
---------------------------------

Please visit the 'Using the Linux Binary Distributions' section in the
Ice 3.7.7 release notes:

https://doc.zeroc.com/rel/ice-releases/ice-3-7/ice-3-7-7-release-notes

Documentation
-------------

The full documentation for Ice is available online:

https://doc.zeroc.com/ice/3.7/

Source Code
------------

The source code for Ice 3.7.7 is on GitHub:

https://github.com/zeroc-ice/ice/releases/tag/v3.7.7
