A UML based methodology for the development of web services: an approach to model tranformation and code generation

Web services are currently one of the most important technologies for enabling an effective communication between and within distributed systems. The Web services technology relies on widely used and well-adopted technologies and open standards. A current trend in software engineering is model-based software development. One of the main goals of model-based software development is the efficient production of high quality software. This thesis presents a comprehensive approach for the model-based development of Web services. The approach is based on a Web service profile for the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which allows an efficient definition of complete Web service models. Such Web service models allow the generation of the complete source code and the corresponding platform-specific configuration files necessary in order to run the modelled Web services. The code generation is realised by means of transformation and code generation rules defined in the Xpand transformation language. In addition to the UML Web service profile and the Xpand transformation rules, a straightforward development model for the application of the profile is proposed. The feasibility of the proposed approach for the model-based development of Web services is validated by implementing a library system Web service.