                    C O R B A   V a l i d a t o r
                  ---------------------------------
                   Copyright 2001 by Michael Rumpf


DISCLAIMER:
-----------
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU Library General Public
License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public
License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.


INTRODUCTION:
-------------
The purpose of the CORBA Validator is to test a CORBA ORB for standard 
compliance. The initial version was written for the ORBit ORB, which was 
aiming at 2.2 compliance at that time.

The test suite does syntax tests only. That means there are a number of
valid IDL files which must compile *without* errors and a number of
invalid IDL files which must compile *with* an error. The Perl script
"validate" reads the contents from the sub-directories idl/valid and
idl/invalid and tries to compile all the files found there. 
The files from idl/valid must compile correctly and the 
files from idl/invalid must not compile at all. New tests can be added
just by adding more files to the two directories.


USAGE:
------
The Makefile can be used to adapt the Validator to any IDL compiler,
just by changing the variables IDLCOMP and IDLFLAGS at the beginning of
Makefile.

The Perl script writes the first line of each IDL file to stdout. Therefore
the first line of an IDL test file should contain a comment, explaining the
IDL construct to be tested.

If the compilation of a valid file failes or the compilation of an invalid 
file is processed without error, the Perl script stops and writes the
contents of the currently processed file to stdout.

The stderr and stdout output from the compiler can be found in 
idl/(in)valid/FILENAME.err and idl/(in)valid/FILENAME.out respectively, 
whereas FILENAME is the name of the file processed by the IDL compiler.

EXTENSIONS:
-----------
I'm sure that I did not cover all the possible error cases. If you find more
tests, please send them to me so that I can add them to the package. This
will help to get a more complete CORBA IDL test suite.  


Michael Rumpf

