Extending CORBA interfaces with protocols

Traditional IDLs were defined for describing the services that objects offe r, but not those services they require from other objects, nor the relative order in which they expect their methods to be called. In this paper we pr opose an extension of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) interface description language (IDL) that uses a sugared subset of the pol yadic pi -calculus for describing object service protocols, aimed at the au tomated checking of protocol interoperability between CORBA objects in open component-based environments. In addition, some advantages and disadvantag es of our proposal are discussed, as well as some of the practical limitati ons encountered when trying to implement and use this sort of IDL extension in open systems.