Toward the Development of Cross-Platform Business Applications via Model-Driven Transformations

In this paper, we present an enhanced model-driven development technique for porting business software applications across multiple software middle-ware platforms (such as IBM WebSphere platform, SAP NetWeaver platform, Oracle/BEA platform, etc). Our approach enhances both forward and reverse engineering of models. First, we present a service-oriented approach to reverse engineer platform independent models from platform specific implementations. We demonstrate that by focusing on service level components of software design one can simplify the model extraction problem significantly while still achieving up to 40%-50% of model reusability. Second, we present a semantic Web service matching based technique for automatic binding of generated artifacts with available client assets in forward engineering. By generating implementation artifacts that are bound where appropriate with clients' existing functionality, our approach helps cut down the development time during project implementations and thereby resulting in reduced project durations and costs. Combining these two enhancements to the traditional model-driven development approach, we demonstrate the feasibility of porting of business applications between two platforms: IBM WebSphere and SAP NetWeaver. Experimental results show that 40%-50% of development efforts can be reduced using our model-driven transformation technique in a 4-6 month development effort.