Interface description language

An Interface Description Language (or alternately, Interface Definition Language), or IDL for short, is a computer language used to describe a software component's interface. IDLs describe an interface in a language-neutral way, enabling communication between software components that do not share a language – for example, between components written in C and components written in Pascal.

IDLs are commonly used in Remote Procedure Call software. In these cases the machines at either end of the "link" may be using different operating systems 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's Distributed Computing Environment, Microsoft's COM, IBM's System Object Model, Mozilla's XPCOM, the Object Management Group's CORBA, and SOAP for Web Services.

• Interface description languages (re: Software componentry)
  • XML-RPC, the predecessor of SOAP
  • SOAP IDL from W3C
  • WDDX
  • Part of both COM and CORBA
  • Open Service Interface Definitions
  • Platform-Independent Component Modeling Language

External links

• OMG Tutorial on OMG IDL
• OMG Specification of OMG IDL

See also

• IDL specification language, the original Interface Description Language