A formal notation and tool for the engineering of CORBA systems

CORBA is a standard proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) in order to promote interoperability between distributed object systems. CORBA provi des a programming-language neutral Interface Definition Language (IDL) that describes the syntactic aspects of services supported by remote objects, H owever, CORBA IDL does not provide any means to specify the behavior of obj ects in an abstract and formal way. In the current practice, behavioral spe cification is provided either in plain English, or directly in the programm ing language chosen for the implementation, We propose to extend the CORBA interface definition of distributed objects by a behavioral specification b ased on high level Petri nets. We detail at the syntactic and semantic leve l how this formalism supports the features of the CORBA object model. We pr esent a realistic case study to demonstrate our approach, Our technique all ows specifying in an abstract, concise and precise way the behavior of CORB A servers, including internal concurrency and synchronization. As the behav ioral specification is fully executable, this approach also enables to prot otype and test a distributed object system as soon as the behaviors of indi vidual objects have been defined. The paper discusses several implementatio n issues of the tool that supports the edition of models and their interact ive excution, The high level of formality of the chosen formalism allows fo r mathematical analysis of behavioral specifications. Copyright (C) 2000 Jo hn Wiley & Sons, Ltd.