RIDL: An interface language for the design and development of reliable distributed object oriented systems

摘要

This paper describes our research on the design and implementation of an interface definition language, called RIDL, for distributed object oriented systems. The major goal of this language is to provide more expressive and flexible facilities for describing not only the signatures of distributed objects as supported by CORBA's EDL[8] and Microsoft's MIDL[6], but also their behaviour, including fault tolerance semantics, in an implementation-independent manner. This allows for more checking and reasoning on the system's behaviour at an early stage so that more cost-effectiveness and reliability could be achieved. Also, by using a sophisticated separation and distribution of the interfaces of objects in a system, RIDL can still allow for the pragmatic requirements of flexibility and performance.