Component-based-Software-Engineering-example2

An interface description language or interface definition language (IDL) is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language. IDLs are usually used to describe

data type In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these ...

s and interfaces in a language-independent way, for example, between those written in C++ and those written in

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

. IDLs are commonly used in

remote procedure call In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared computer network), which is written as if it were a ...

software. In these cases the machines at either end of the ''link'' may be using different

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s and computer languages. IDLs offer a bridge between the two different systems. Software systems based on IDLs include Sun's ONC RPC,

The Open Group The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing " open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It has 900+ member organizations and provides a number of services ...

's Distributed Computing Environment,

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

's System Object Model, the

Object Management Group The Object Management Group (OMG®) is a computer industry Standards Development Organization (SDO), or Voluntary Consensus Standards Body (VCSB). OMG develops enterprise integration and modeling standards for a range of technologies. Busin ...

CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sy ...

(which implements OMG IDL, an IDL based on DCE/RPC) and

Data Distribution Service The Data Distribution Service (DDS) for real-time systems is an Object Management Group (OMG) machine-to-machine (sometimes called middleware or connectivity framework) standard that aims to enable dependable, high-performance, interoperable, ...

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

XPCOM Cross Platform Component Object Model (XPCOM) is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Component Object Model (COM), Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and system object model (SOM). It features multiple ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's Microsoft RPC (which evolved into COM and DCOM),

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

's Thrift and

WSDL The Web Services Description Language (WSDL ) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also ...

for Web services.

Examples

AIDL

-based, for Android; supports local and remote procedure calls, can be accessed from native applications by calling through

Java Native Interface The Java Native Interface (JNI) is a foreign function interface programming framework that enables Java code running in a Java virtual machine (JVM) to call and be called by native applications (programs specific to a hardware and operating s ...

(JNI) *

Apache Thrift Thrift is an IDL (interface definition language, Interface Definition Language) and Binary protocol, binary communication protocol used for defining and creating service (systems architecture), services for programming languages. It was developed ...

: from

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

, originally developed by

* Avro IDL: for the Apache Avro system *

ASN.1 Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) is a standard interface description language (IDL) for defining data structures that can be serialized and deserialized in a cross-platform way. It is broadly used in telecommunications and computer networ ...

Cap'n Proto Cap’n Proto is a Serialization, data serialization format and Remote procedure call, Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework for exchanging data between computer programs. The high-level design focuses on speed and security, making it suitable f ...

: created by its former maintainer, avoids some of the perceived shortcomings of

Protocol Buffers Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs that communicate with each other over a network or for storing data. The method involves an ...

. * Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL, RFC 8610): A Notation for

CBOR Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a binary data serialization format loosely based on JSON authored by Carsten Bormann and Paul Hoffman. Like JSON it allows the transmission of data objects that contain attribute–value pair, name ...

and

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

data structures * CortoScript: Describe data and/or interfaces for systems that require

Semantic interoperability Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable Logic in computer science, logic, inferencing, knowledge discove ...

* Etch: Cisco's Etch Cross-platform Service Description Language * Extensible Data Notation (EDN):

Clojure Clojure (, like ''closure'') is a dynamic programming language, dynamic and functional programming, functional dialect (computing), dialect of the programming language Lisp (programming language), Lisp on the Java (software platform), Java platfo ...

data format, similar to JSON * FlatBuffers: Serialization format from

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

supporting zero-copy deserialization * Franca IDL: the open-source Franca interface definition language
FIDL
Interface description language for the Fuchsia Operating System designed for writing app components in C, C++, Dart, Go and

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH) ...

. * IDL specification language: the original Interface Description Language
IPL
Imandra Protocol Language *

Web-Service Protocol (

JSON-WSP JSON-WSP is a web service protocol that uses JSON for service description, requests and responses. It is inspired from JSON-RPC, but the lack of a service description specification with documentation in JSON-RPC sparked the design of JSON-WSP. T ...

) * Lightweight Imaging Device Interface Language *

Microsoft Interface Definition Language Microsoft Interface Definition Language (MIDL) is a text-based interface description language from Microsoft, based on the DCE/RPC IDL which it extends for use with the Microsoft Component Object Model. Its compiler is also called MIDL. Version ...

(MIDL): the Microsoft extension of OMG IDL to add support for

Component Object Model Component Object Model (COM) is a binary-interface technology for software components from Microsoft that enables using objects in a language-neutral way between different programming languages, programming contexts, processes and machines ...

(COM) and

Distributed Component Object Model Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) is a proprietary Microsoft technology for communication between software components on networked computers. DCOM, which originally was called "Network OLE", extends Microsoft's COM, and provides the co ...

(DCOM) *

OMG IDL The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sy ...

: standardized by

, used in

(for DCE/RPC services) and DDS (for

data modeling Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. It may be applied as part of broader Model-driven engineering (MDE) concept. Overview Data modeli ...

), also selected by the W3C for exposing the DOM of XML, HTML, and CSS documents *

OpenAPI Specification The OpenAPI Specification, previously known as the Swagger Specification, is a Specification (technical standard), specification for a Machine-readable medium, machine-readable interface definition language for describing, producing, consuming and ...

: a standard for Web APIs, used by Swagger and other technologies. *

Open Service Interface Definitions An open service interface definition (OSID) is a programmatic interface specification describing a service. These interfaces are specified by the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to achieve interop ...

's IDL * RESTful Service Description Language (RSDL)
Smithy
An AWS-invented protocol-agnostic interface definition language. * Specification Language for

Internet Communications Engine The Internet Communications Engine, or Ice, is an open-source RPC framework developed by ZeroC. It provides SDKs for C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, MATLAB, Objective-C, PHP, Python, Ruby and Swift, and can run on various operating systems, incl ...

(Ice: Slice) * Universal Network Objects:

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

's component model *

Web Application Description Language The Web Application Description Language (WADL) is a machine-readable XML description of HTTP-based web services. WADL models the resources provided by a service and the relationships between them. WADL is intended to simplify the reuse of web serv ...

(WADL) *

Web IDL Web IDL is an interface description language (IDL) format for describing APIs (application programming interfaces) that are intended to be implemented in web browsers. Its adoption was motivated by the desire to improve the interoperability of ...

WHATWG The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) is a community of people interested in evolving HTML and related technologies. The WHATWG was founded by individuals from Apple Inc., the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software, ...

: can be used to describe interfaces that are intended to be implemented in web browsers *

Web Services Description Language The Web Services Description Language (WSDL ) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also ...

(WSDL) * XCB: X protocol description language for

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

* Cross Platform Interface Description Language ( XPIDL): Mozilla's way to specify XPCOM interfaces

References

{{Reflist

External links

Documenting Software Architecture: Documenting Interfaces
(PDF)
OMG Specification of OMG IDL

Data modeling languages Remote procedure call Specification languages Domain-specific programming languages

Examples

See also

References

External links