software development qu

Hope this isn't too off-topic. [Background:] I'm developing a enterprise web development platform of sorts; the details aren't too important, but I'm looking for a way to keep this as general as possible. PHP is my embedded language of choice, and I'll develop the software in PHP first, but I'd first like to come up with a standardized API of sorts to interface with the database and provide (web developer) user functionality. This way, when I (or someone else) port the application to say, Perl or JSP (ColdFusion is just out! I think I'll make it a part of my license that it can never be ported to CF. :-) ), each implementation has a common interface. [Real question:] So, I've looked into using IDL (Java - CORBA) as a standardized way to define my API. This seems to be a decent way to do it -- although I have no need to use the CORBA functionality that it provides. I just need a standardized way to DEFINE my API . . . for reference mostly. Has anyone dealt with this? What do you use to do this? Or is there a standard technique used in the industry? Thanks in advance. Dean.