Modeling interface definition language extensions

Abstract

Interface definition languages (IDLs) serve to specify module and interface names, as well as operation signatures. However, IDLs lack a means to express aspects, such as synchronization constraints, pre- and post-conditions, invariants, quality-of-service annotations and real-time annotations. We develop a framework to specify the IDL and a given IDL extension in a combined modeling language based on XML. We show how this specification can serve to obtain tools to process the extended IDL. We study this approach along the lines of the OMG IDL and the CORBA middleware platform. The specification of semantic aspects and the specification of the IDL is based on XML document type definitions.