Releasing XIDL - IDL for SOAP proposal

     Hi everyone,

     Interface definition languages for SOAP seem to be getting more and
more attention. We, at the group that developed IBM's Reference
Implementation, have been working on this problem too. Since proposals are
already being made,  we figure out it was time to contribute our work to
the discussion.

     Hence, we have just posted a proposed IDL language for SOAP. It is
included in the download page of SOAP for Java (IBM's Reference
Implementation  for SOAP v1.1), at the Alphaworks site, as an independent
download. Just visit

     http://www.alphaWorks.ibm.com/tech/soap4j

and select the "SOAP interface definition language proposal". This is a
short description of XIDL, an XML-based interface definition language
designed with two basic goals in mind: extreme simplicity and type system
independence.  XIDL uses very few different elements and will be able to
work with any existing type definition languages because it assumes that
all types are defined externally. Moreover, XIDL can be be directly mapped
into a subset of the OMG's IDL. The purpose of all these features is, of
course, to foster faster adoption and and easier integration into existing
code bases.

     The document includes a schema, a simple example, and a short
description of the language. Comments are very welcomed!

     Matthew J. Duftler, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Paco Curbera.
     Component Systems Group, IBM TJ Watson Research Center,
     Hawthorne, NY 10532.

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 23:13:50 UTC