Client-Side Slice-to-MATLAB Mapping

The client-side Slice-to-MATLAB mapping defines how Slice data types are translated to MATLAB types, and how clients invoke operations, pass parameters, and handle errors. Much of the MATLAB mapping is intuitive. For example, Slice sequences map to MATLAB arrays, so there is essentially nothing new you have to learn in order to use Slice sequences in MATLAB.

Much of what appears in this chapter is reference material. We suggest that you skim the material on the initial reading and refer back to specific sections as needed. However, we recommend that you read at least the mappings for exceptions, interfaces, and operations in detail because these sections cover how to call operations from a client, pass parameters, and handle exceptions.

In order to use the MATLAB mapping, you should need no more than the Slice definition of your application and knowledge of the MATLAB mapping rules. In particular, looking through the generated code in order to discern how to use the MATLAB mapping is likely to be inefficient, due to the amount of detail. Of course, occasionally, you may want to refer to the generated code to confirm a detail of the mapping, but we recommend that you otherwise use the material presented here to see how to write your client-side code.

The Ice Module
All of the APIs for the Ice run time are nested in the Ice package, to avoid clashes with definitions for other libraries or applications. Some of the contents of the Ice package are generated from Slice definitions; other parts of the Ice package provide special-purpose definitions that do not have a corresponding Slice definition. We will incrementally cover the contents of the Ice package throughout the remainder of the chapter.

A MATLAB application can load the Ice run time using the loadlibrary function:

loadlibrary('ice', @iceproto);

or

loadlibrary('ice'); % requires a C/C++ compiler to build the generated "thunk" library

If the function executes without error, the Ice run time is loaded and available for use. You can determine the version of the Ice run time you have just loaded by calling the stringVersion function:

icever = Ice.stringVersion();

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