A new posting over on PHP Magazine's website today talks about a new set of scripts that provides access to the Ice facilities. It is a thin integration layer implemented in C++ using the Ice C++ run-time library. It supplies a robust subset of the Ice run-time facilities. PHP scripts are able to use all of the Slice data types in a natural way, make remote invocations, and use all of the advanced Ice services such as routers, locaters, and protocol plug-ins.

The PHP implementation of Ice (according to Harry Fuecks) seems to have been largely inspired by CORBA but developed out of a very specific need - bringing some serious collaboration to WISH - an online massively multiplayer game. Support for PHP (as a client only) was an objective from the start, to allow administration of the game via the web and comes in the form of an extension for PHP5 (required)."

...so far it looks very promising as a mechanism to get PHP talking to remote systems, when you need something more powerful / performant than, say, XML based web services.

This set of scripts seems to have quite a bit of power behind them - it will be interesting to see where this might lead...