4.2 Compiling IDL for a CORBA application

4.2.2 IDL files in Dylan projects

IDL files can be treated as part of Dylan projects, allowing the IDL interface to be compiled at the same time as the project's Dylan sources. This is in fact the simplest way to manage a Dylan project that uses CORBA facilities.

However, you do not include IDL files directly in the project. Rather, each IDL file that a project depends on is represented in the project by a corresponding Functional Developer Tool Specification (spec) file.

The spec file indicates the path to the IDL file, and states which of the skeletons, stubs, and protocol libraries the project requires. The Functional Developer development environment uses the spec file to invoke the IDL compiler as part of the normal build process for the project.

The Bank-Client and Bank-Server projects each contain a spec file for the bank.idl file. The Bank-Client project's spec file, idl.spec, requests that stubs and protocol libraries be generated. The Bank-Server project's spec file requests that skeletons, stubs, and protocol libraries be generated. (This second spec file is also called idl.spec but is a different file to the one in Bank-Client.)

After building both the bank client and the bank server, there will be three new subfolders:

Examples\corba\bank\bank\stubs
: Contains the project bank-stubs.hdp that defines the Bank-Stubs library. This library is used by the implementation of the bank client. Its project is automatically added to bank-client.hdp as a subproject.
Examples\corba\bank\bank\skeletons
: Contains the project bank-skeletons.hdp that defines the Bank-Skeletons library. This library is used by the implementation of the bank server. Its project is automatically added to bank-server.hdp as a subproject.
Examples\corba\bank\bank\protocol
: Contains the project bank-protocol.hdp that defines the Bank-Protocol library. This library is shared by both the Bank-Skeletons and Bank-Stubs libraries, and added automatically to the projects of both.