Domain Specific Language Approach on Model-driven Development of Web Services

Abstract

As modern distributed and cloud architecture keep gaining their popularity, web services have become the programmatic backbones of more and more systems. Developing web services requires gathering information from different aspects. Model-driven engineering promises to ease the burden of development and promote reuse of web services by focusing more on a higher level of abstraction. Current approach of modeling web services using UML is not well-suited since UML is created for multiple disciplines and is not specific for web service development. With current growing scale of distributed systems, the challenge is not only in development but also integration and maintenance of web services. Introducing a domain specific language (DSL) for modeling of web services promises to become a novel approach and could be the solution to the current problem with web service modeling and development. This article outlines the analysis as well as the current state of the problem domain and introduces an approach to model-driven development of web services by implementing a domain specific language called SWSM (Simple Web Service Modeling). This approach aims to solve problems that UML could not effectively resolve and promote efficiency with a non-complex language facility for modeling and code generation of web services. Our best practices and observation during the design of SWSM are also presented.