Patent Document ID: 6032198
Application ID: 09038000

Base Claim:
1. A program design supporting apparatus for supporting the design of a plurality of programs distributed on a network and operated through the communication between the programs, comprising: program definition means for storing definition information of each of said programs in response to input of a user; inter-program relation definition means for storing a relation between said programs in response to input of the user; interface definition means for storing interface information of each of said programs in response to input of the user; and means for converting the interface information stored for each of said programs into an interface definition language (IDL) format to generate an IDL file.

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Claim 3:
3. A program design supporting apparatus according to claim 1, further comprising a repository for storing and managing the interface information and data items, said interface definition means reading the interface information and a data item from said repository so that they are used for the interface definition.