A design pattern based approach to generating synchronization adaptors from annotated IDL

Abstract

Middleware forms such as CORBA and DCOM provide standard component interfaces, interaction protocols and communication services to support interoperability of object-oriented applications operating in heterogeneous and distributed environments. General-purpose services and facilities foster re-use and help reduce development costs. Yet the degree of automation of the software development process is limited to the generation of skeleton and stub code from component interface specifications given in a common interface definition language (IDL). This is mainly due to the fact that the expressiveness of current IDLs is limited to the specification of type and operation signatures. Important properties of crucial components of security-, safety-critical or reactive applications such as object behavior, timing or synchronization constraints cannot be documented formally, let alone checked automatically. In this paper, we continue developing solutions for adding specifications of semantic properties to component interfaces and automatically synthesizing code that instruments corresponding semantic checks. Independently from the concrete syntax and semantics of such specification elements, we present a collection of design patterns that allow the designer to seamlessly integrate the synthesized code with the code frames generated by standard IDL compilers. We study these approaches along the concrete example of extending CORBA IDL with synchronization constraints and we evaluate several implementations, solely based on standardized features of the CORBA standard.