This chapter describes the Interface Definition Language, IDL, which is used to describe the interfaces of objects in OrbixWeb. The language itself is part of the Object Management Group (OMG) CORBA specification. IDL is not a programming language because it cannot be used to implement the interfaces that are defined in IDL. An advantage of IDL is that it allows interfaces to be defined independently of the languages used to implement and use these interfaces, and therefore it makes it easy to support language interoperability.
This chapter describes the features of the IDL language. Appendix A, "IDL Reference" of the OrbixWeb Reference Guide provides some additional reference material on IDL. This includes the full syntax of the language and a list of IDL keywords.