The Internet Connection Engine (ICE http://www.zeroc.com) provides an excellent
middleware technology alternative to approaches such as HTTP Transports (XMLRPC,
SOAP, REST), CORBA, and DCOM.  Creating highly performant, network-distributed GIS
applications can be extremely challenging.  Additionally, operating in a programming
language-agnostic environment is also a frequent requirement.  ICE is a feature-rich
middleware technology that can be used to attack both of these problems.  This
presentation will discuss using ICE for GIS software development, demonstrate some
basic functionality of ICE, and provide examples that developers can follow to
incorporate ICE in their software development.