Another fundamental piece of the CORBA architecture is the use of the Interface Definition Language (IDL).
IDL, which specifies interfaces between CORBA objects, is instrumental in ensuring CORBA's language
independence. Because interfaces described in IDL can be mapped to any programming language, CORBA
applications and components are thus independent of the language(s) used to implement them. In other words, a
client written in C++ can communicate with a server written in Java, which in turn can communicate with
another server written in COBOL, and so forth.
One important thing to remember about IDL is that it is not an implementation language. That is, you can't write
applications in IDL. The sole purpose of IDL is to define interfaces; providing implementations for these
interfaces is performed using some other language. When you study IDL more closely on Day 3, you'll learn
more about this and other assorted facts about IDL.
Interfaces: references, inheritance, and operations