Automating Web Service Development Using a Unified Model

Web service standards are being developed in a loosely coordinated and constantly evolving manner and there is a lack of Web service modeling approaches that efficiently reflect the status of the standardization. Consequently the development and deployment of Web services tend to be ad-hoc and platform-oriented. This introduces potential interoperability issues and maintenance overhead. This paper proposes a model-driven framework that includes a Web service modeling language describing functionality and non-functional properties of service-oriented applications in unified models. This Web service modeling language is based on a Web service meta-model extracted directly from the WS-* standards. We developed a corresponding tool that generates code stubs, configurations and deployment heuristics, along with standard-based artifacts from models. We conducted a real-world case study to validate our approach.