Introducing formal methods to software engineers through OMG's CORBA environment and interface definition language

Abstract

This paper talks about an ongoing project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in which the interface definition language IDL of OMG's CORBA environment is extended with formal specification constructs. Tool support is provided to compile the specifications into code that can perform sanity checks to provide an added amount of security in a distributed system.

The software engineering industry has long been resisting formal methods as a means to improving software quality. This work attempts to maintain the current level of software quality while the complexity of software increases due to the presence of distributed objects. We hope that a means to maintain (rather than improve) software quality will be accepted more easily by the software engineering industry.

This paper motivates the need for formal methods in the CORBA environment and presents an overview of Borneo, the specification language extension of IDL.