Closing the loop: Considerations for integrating multiple applications that implement the same Express specification

This paper is a post-mortem report on one phase of a complex project, the Advanced Reservoir Management (ARM) project, more commonly known as the ``Oil and Gas`` project. This particular phase, developing an Express-to-IDL compiler, was a high-risk/high-return attempt to implement a solution for the Oil and Gas project that would greatly ease the development of the virtual organization tools, and could be easily re-used in a weapons-related project (i.e., Global Weapons Information System). The potential leverage between these two projects was the major motivation for the task. Section 1 briefly describes the two projects, and the consequent motivation for developing the compiler. Section 2 describes the development process for the compiler and some of the minor difficulties along the way. Section 3 elaborates on the major difficulty uncovered once the author had the compiler. Section 4 outlines considerations for projects that might want to use the technology. Express is a data definition language and IDL is the Interface Definition Language, which is used to define the interfaces between the distributed objects