OpenDDS | Object Management Group Data Distribution Service

It does. It is a standard OMG IDL feature and is the same across all DDS implementations.

The IDL language is defined in the OMG IDL specification. It consists of a number of building blocks that include Core Data Types, like the structures and primitive data types that you mentioned, and Interfaces, that includes the methods you asked about.

However, only a subset of those building blocks is used by DDS. For the current version 4.2, section 9.3 DDS Profiles defines which of them are relevant for three different levels of support by DDS: Plain DDS, Extensible DDS and DDS over RPC.

You will see that the latter indeed includes Building Block Interfaces - Basic, as you might expect from RPC. However, not all DDS implementations support RPC. Plain DDS and Extensible DDS are more commonly supported and interfaces are not part of that functionality.

Since you asked about this in another question: note that the interface functionality as captured in DDS over RPC is not for the purpose of distributing objects with their methods, but for invoking methods on objects remotely -- as the name Remote Procedure Call implies.

Yes, OpenDDS has a code generator, opendds_idl, which is one of OpenDDS's core components. It can run manually, through MPC, or in CMake using OPENDDS_TARGET_SOURCES like you have here.

The error is pretty self explanatory. This is the CMakeLists.txt file from the Developer's Guide Messenger example, which includes C++ files. CMake can't find them. Maybe you copied CMakeLists.txt somewhere else without also copying the cpp files? If so you can copy the cpp files to where you copied CMakeLists.txt.

JNI is what allows Java and the native C++ code to interact with one another. OpenDDS's JNI code isn't checking for Java exceptions like it should and this is what the warnings are about. They show up in the all Java tests I can see, but apparently they are ignored by the system that report errors and warnings. I think they come up because -Xcheck:jni is one of the java arguments in the test script framework. So if you take out that argument of the file I linked or run java directly without that argument the warnings shouldn't be there.

You don't really need it and you're free to start the programs directly. All examples and tests in OpenDDS have a file called run_test.pl for the purposes of testing. Among other functions, they define what programs get called with what arguments for a certain test scenario and are responsible for killing the programs if they get stuck.

You have to generate the solutions with the correct MPC project type, you are now generating solutions for Visual Studio 2003. Replace -type vc71 with -type vs2019 and build it again.

You could install the missing dependency. Alternatively you could try Strawberry Perl.

Just run configure and make. Don't set a prefix for configure file on the command line.you will get Messanger example output smoothly using run_test.pl.

This was fixed in this PR: https://github.com/objectcomputing/OpenDDS/pull/1701, but that hasn't made it into a release yet. I can't comment in the comment chain above, but dxiv is correct that this is caused by an include dependency that broke in VS2019. It's only in the dds/DCPS/Serializer.h header though, so just having your friend change that file to how it is in the PR should allow it to build.