Ice

Murmur supports remote scripting using [ZeroC ICE], a RPC mechanism. There are bindings for C++, Java, .NET, Python, PHP and Ruby, and this is supported on all our platforms (Win32, Linux and OSX). ICE also works over a network, meaning you can create a web application that interfaces with a murmur process running on another machine.

Getting ready to use ICE

You can download ICE directly from ZeroC. If you installed a binary version of Murmur, it already includes the necesarry components for running ICE, but you might need additional tools to develop with it.

Apache and PHP

If you want to use ICE from PHP, you'll need to tell the PHP parser where to find the slice (Specification Language for ICE) file for Murmur, which is called simply Murmur.ice. If you're running from the command line, you'll need to create a file called php.ini in the directory you are running from. Insert the following:

ice.slice = /path/to/Murmur.ice

When you get far enough that it's time to run the script from Apache, you'll need to tell Apache's PHP parser where to find the slice file. If you have a /etc/php.d file, you can simply create a new murmur.ini file in that directory with the same contents as the php.ini above. If not, you'll have to append it at the end of /etc/php.ini

Using ICE

How to use ICE differs from language to language. The parameters and method names will remain the same, but the syntax will naturally be different. Murmur will, by default, open up an adapter on port 6502 (or 10000 for homedir installs), which has a single accessible object named "Meta". This is the Meta server, and from it you can retrieve adapters for any configured server.

There's an example included in the source; have a look at [icedemo.php].