The Internet Communications Engine, or Ice, is an object-oriented middleware platform that provides object-oriented remote procedure call, grid computing and publish/subscribe functionality developed by ZeroC and dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License 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.