Adding Semantic Information to IDLs. Is it Really Practical?

Traditional IDLs were defined for describing the services that objects oer, but not those services they require from other objects, nor the partial ordering in which their services are expected to be used. In this paper we propose an IDL extension that uses a subset of -calculus for describing objects service protocols. Our approach can be also used in a component-oriented environment for automated checking of protocol interoperability between objects, and it is supported by a platform that controls the dynamic composition of components. Besides, we describe the advantages of our proposal and discuss about some of the practical limitations encountered when trying to implement and use this sort of extensions to object IDLs.