Interface description language

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An interface description language or interface definition language is a declarative formal language and includes a language syntax for describing interfaces of software - component .

With their help, objects and the methods that can be applied to them, including the possible parameters and data types , can be described without using the properties of a specific programming language. The interface description language is used purely to describe the interface, but not to formulate algorithms.

Based on the interface description language, a special compiler can convert the definitions into a specific programming language and computer architecture, the so-called language binding .

An interface description language is mostly found in distributed systems in which a client can execute methods on another computer ( remote procedure call ), for example COM (MIDL), gRPC , CORBA or Java RMI .

AIDL

The Android Interface Definition Language is a Java- like language for the definition of RPC interfaces (for interprocess communication, IPC ). AIDL programs are stored in the Android development system (e.g. Android Studio ) as .aidl files, from which the Android SDK tools automatically generate Java files (similar to XML resource files). This can be used to make remote procedure calls.

CORBA IDL

The Interface Definition Language ( IDL ) from OMG is an interface description language with C ++ -like syntax that was developed for CORBA .

With CORBA, the definitions can also be loaded into the interface repository at runtime without a special compiler and can be queried dynamically by the software ( Dynamic Invocation Interface or Dynamic Skeleton Interface ).

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