An EDOC-based approach for specific middleware services development

Several approaches for software development are being proposed to capture a domain and to reuse in future developments. Specific middleware services are an approach to facilitate the development of specific distributed applications. The modeling of the stable aspects of the domain is an important and fundamental feature of this approach. The construction of a distributed application based on MDA starts with the definition of a middleware-independent model called PIM. Then, a model named PSM is defined according to the middleware the application will be implemented on. The EDOC profile is one of the OMG UML profile with the goal to present a notation to simplify the development of distributed objects-and-components-based systems. Describing the services through EDOC as a PIM, generic models can be reached, decoupling them from common-services implementations found in the several middleware platforms. Portability is reached once a PIM can be translated into several PSMs and platform-specific code. This paper presents a development process for specific middleware services based on the MDA, using EDOC and RM-ODP concepts, and also presents a model transformation tool, called transforms, to automate the necessary steps of the process.