Feature model for the service provider in the service oriented architecture

Abstract

A widely used approach to develop a Service Provider (SP) in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), called contract-first, consists of designing service contracts that will be used to generate the SP source code. The goal of a service contract is expressing the features (e.g., services and capabilities) of the required SP. The two most known traditional service contracts in the literature are: WSDL and WADL. We identify that these service contracts suffer from several problems, such as they only allow expressing a limited set of features. In order to overcome such problems, we propose a Feature Model (FM), named FM sp , that can be considered as a service contract for SP. The features of FM sp are designed to generate valid, customized and fully functional SPs. A key point in our FM sp is that it relies on SOA Design Patterns (DPs) to define its features. The constraints expressed between the DPs in our FM sp allow to easily developing valid compound DPs in the SP. Because DPs are proven solutions, then our FM sp will generate proven SPs as well. We evaluate our FM sp through a practical case study. The results show that the advantage of our FM sp compared with the traditional service contracts is, it permits to automatically generates valid, customized, fully functional and based-DP SPs in a short time.