Generic Interfaces to Remote Applications in Open Systems

Future industrial production and engineering environments will profit substantially from emerging open distributed computer communication network environments. They will, in principle, be able to benefit from a high potential of services available in such environments to support individual client applications. In practice, however, free and flexible client/ server cooperations are frequently hindered by the great and confusing variety of interfaces involved in accessing various and heterogeneous network services. In order to support open client/ server cooperations in distributed systems, this contribution proposes a unifying description mechanism for remote services in computer networks. It describes an application oriented generic communication service, which facilitates client/ server cooperation in open systems. Most important basis for such a service is a uniform service specification mechanism for open server interfaces. Correspondingly, the paper first specifies a specific service interface description language (SIDL). It then shows how such a service interface description could also be used for automatic creation of server-specific local human user interfaces. In combination, a generic network interface description language (NIDL) specification, as proposed here, supports client applications in open systems by providing a common mechanism to access and utilize any service available anywhere in the network. Keyword Codes: C.2.4, H.4, H.5.0