Towards an MDA Mechanism for RESTful Services Development

Automated software engineering research aspires to lead to more consistent software, faster delivery and lower production costs. Meanwhile, RESTful design is rapidly gaining momentum towards becoming the primal software engineering paradigm for the web, due to its simplicity and reusability. This paper attempts to couple the two perspectives and take the first step towards applying the MDE paradigm to RESTful service development at the PIM zone. A UML profile is introduced, which performs PIM meta-modeling of RESTful web services abiding by the third level of Richardson’s maturity model. The profile embeds a slight variation of the MVC design pattern to capture the core REST qualities of a resource. The proposed profile is followed by an indicative example that demonstrates how to apply the concepts presented, in order to automate PIM production of a system according to MOF stack. Next steps include the introduction of the corresponding CIM, PSM and code production.