Adding semantics to interface definition languages

Developing distributed heterogeneous systems is a difficult task. A number of architectures have been developed to abstract the complex underlying technologies and present a simpler foundation to the software engineer. Many of these architectures make use of an interface definition language (IDL) to simplify programming development. These IDLs allow the developer to express the properties of an interface but not its semantics. This paper details an approach which software engineers can take to express the semantics of an interface without the need to extend IDLs. A demonstration of this approach is detailed in this paper.