PEIDL : An Interaction Protocol Specification Language for Software Components

The Interface Definition Languages (IDLs) used by commercial middleware standards such as CORBA primarily address the signature aspects o f sof ware component interfaces. They do not cover important semantic aspec ts, e.g. the correct way in which component services are to be used. This often poses significant problems for designing component-based systems, esp ecially where third-party components are used. In this report, we propose a fo rm l but user-friendly language, called the Protocol-Equipped IDL (PEIDL ), for the interface specification of components. This language augments commercial IDLs with capabilities of precisely describing component interaction protoco ls. It employs unambiguous temporal operators to capture sequencing and co ncurrency constraints between component operation invocations. According ly, t enables the precise specification of the interoperability requirements of components as well as the automated inter-component interoperability checking in a composite system.