It's been almost a year since my last update.
Unfortunately apart from some initial progress with adding a web-based UI not much happened to the ICE adapter repo. I took multiple approaches to de-spaghetti the code, but still I couldn't even make sense of what I'm trying to change there. And everytime I tried to refactor something I ended up in modules that do not even belong there.
The lack of any kind of automated tests and the lack of the ability to run 2 ice adapters in parallel from the same IDE made it impossible for me to gain any progress.
So a month ago I started with a new approach. I tried to use the Ice4J library (the fundamental library that the ICE adapter is built around) in a standalone project and tried to figure out how to use it. Also ChatGPT was a big help, as it creates better docs than the original authors...
Starting from this and then decomposing the ice adapter classes I could iteratively figure out how the ice adapter actually works. So with each iteration I drew my learnings into a diagram until I had a good overview over how it actually works. This can be found here.
Based on these insights I started to slowly build up a brand new, cleaner implementation of the ice adapter in Kotlin. It's far from done yet, but it already has an integration test that connects 2 ice adapters locally, which proves me that this is possible.
The code was published today and can be found in this new repository.
The next step is to achieve functional parity with the java implementation. This might take a few more months though. So stay tuned for the update next year