A Model Driven Approach for the Development of Semantic RESTful Web Services

Abstract

Nowadays, Web services and others SOA-based applications have attracted more attention in the software industry. The RESTful Web Service becomes an important service architectural style due to its simplicity, heterogeneity and web-based format. One of the principal advantages of the REST architecture is the interoperability. However, different implementation languages and representation data formats can break interoperability, especially on semantic description of these services. In this paper, we propose the use of a model driven approach for the development of semantic RESTful Web services. Raising the development abstraction level, providing language-independent metamodels of services and semantic resources and by model transformations it is possible to develop interoperable complex services.

Architectural pattern for service collaboration

“…In this architecture, the focus is on resources and not on the call to the procedure/service. This approach is interesting for applications where the focus on interoperability is greater than the formal contract between the parties [3]. Fielding [4] REST architectural style describes six constraints which define the basis of RESTful-style: i) the uniform interface is the interface between clients and servers, simplifying the architecture, enabling each part to evolve independently; ii) stateless, as the key of REST services, refers to the necessary state to handle the request whether as part of the uniform resource identifier (URI), querystring parameters, body, or headers; iii) cacheable, as clients cache responses, eliminating some client-server interactions further improving scalability and performance; iv) client-server-clients not concerned with data storage, which remains internal to each server, so that the portability of client code is improved and servers are not concerned with the user interface or user state, so that servers can be simpler and more scalable; v) layered system-a client cannot ordinarily tell whether it is connected directly to the end server or to an intermediary along the way and code on demand; and vi) the optional constraint [5].…”

Emf-Rest

“…Some of these works provide support for the generation of Web services as well, but support for generation of RESTful APIs is very limited [12,16,20]. Moreover, these approaches require the designer to specifically model the API itself using some kind of tool-specific DSL from which then the API is (partially) generated.…”

“…REST proposes the development of stateless distributed services and relies on simple URIs and HTTP verbs to make the Web services broadly available for a number of front-end devices. With the increasing interest in developing modelbased applications on the Web, some approaches have appeared [12,16,20] to cope with the model-driven generation of Web services, however, their support to generate RESTful Web APIs is very limited.…”

Model-driven Development of RESTful APIs

“…WSDL 1.0 and WADL could also formally describe REST but not RESTful APIs due to the lack of hypermedia support in the specification. As a consequence, the research of (Tavares and Vale, 2013) omitted hypermedia in their meta-model and in the transformation process to WADL. Similar WADL descriptions were produced by (Laitkorpi et al, 2009) including the hypermedia constraint in their modelto-model transformation.…”