Extending CORBA interfaces with protocols

Traditional IDLs were defined for describing the services that objects offer, but not those services they require from other objects, nor the relative order in which they expect their methods to be called. In this paper we propose an extension of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) interface description language (IDL) that uses a sugared subset of the polyadic pi -calculus for describing object service protocols, aimed at the automated checking of protocol interoperability between CORBA objects in open component-based environments. In addition, some advantages and disadvantages of our proposal are discussed, as well as some of the practical limitations encountered when trying to implement and use this sort of IDL extension in open systems.