RESTful Web Services Development With a Model-Driven Engineering Approach

Abstract

A RESTful web service implementation requires following the constrains inherent to REST architectural style, which, being a non-trivial task, often leads to solutions that do not fulfill those requirements properly. Model-driven techniques have been proposed to improve the development of complex applications. In model-driven software development, software is not implemented manually based on informal descriptions but partially or completely generated from formal models derived from metamodels. A model-driven approach, materialized in a domain specific language that integrates the OpenAPI specification, an emerging standard for describing REST services, allows developers to use a design first approach in the web service development process, focusing in the definition of resources and their relationships, leaving the repetitive code production process to the automation provided by model-driven engineering techniques. The code generation process covers the entire web-service flow from the description and exposure of the endpoints to the definition of database tables.