Putting the MMORF project on Ice?

Ice - Internet Communications Engine - is a middleware package designed for object handling across a network, designed by ZeroC. A "replacement" for CORBA, and an improvement upon SOAP and XML-RPC, this package looks very impressive indeed.

Perhaps too impressive.

I'm surprised I haven't heard of Ice before now. It turns out that Ice was used (in fact, one of the articles I read implied it was designed for) the MMORPG game Wish (which I have mentioned before).

Ice handles multiple servers and a multitude of clients. It pretty much handles all of the server-server and client-server communication needed for MMORF.

And that's the problem.

As my very first post said, the point of MMORF is to see if I can do it myself. All of it. Every part of a MMO system, from the database storage, to inter-server communication, to running a multi-million object world. If I use Ice as the foundation for communication, I'm almost cheating myself, aren't I?

And thus I have a quandary.

Luckily(?), I need such a system for a work-related project, so I'm going to continue to read about Ice, and see if, at the very least, it's what that project needs.

After that, the question becomes whether I can write my own (as-good) implementation of Ice for MMORF, or whether I break down and use it.