Development of service-oriented architectures using model-driven development : a mapping study

Context: Model-Driven Development (MDD) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are two challenging research areas in software engineering. MDD is about improving software development whilst SOA is a service-based conceptual development style, therefore investigating the available proposals in the literature to use MDD when developing SOA may be insightful. However, no studies have been found with this purpose. Objective: This work aims at assessing the state of the art in MDD for SOA systems. It mainly focuses on: what are the characteristics of MDD approaches that support SOA; what types of SOA are supported; how do they handle non-functional requirements. Method: We conducted a mapping study following a rigorous protocol. We identified the representative set of venues that should be included in the study. We applied a search string over the set of selected venues. As result, 129 papers were selected and analysed (both frequency analysis and correlation analysis) with respect to the defined classification criteria derived from the research questions. Threats to validity were identified and mitigated whenever possible. Results: The analysis allows us to answer the research questions. We highlight: (1) predominance of papers from Europe and written by researchers only; (2) predominance of top-down transformation in software development activities; (3) inexistence of consolidated methods; (4) significant percentage of works without tool support; (5) SOA systems and service compositions more targeted than single services and SOA enterprise systems; (6) limited use of metamodels; (7) very limited use of NFRs; and (8) limited application in real cases. Conclusion: This mapping study does not just provide the state of the art in the topic, but also identifies several issues that deserve investigation in the future, for instance the need of methods for activities other than software development (e.g., migration) or the need of conducting more real case studies.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Model-driven development of adaptive service-based systems with aspects and rules

Also cited as journal article: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010; 6488:548-563Service-oriented computing (SOC) has become a dominant paradigm in developing distributed Web-based software systems. Besides the benefits such as interoperability and flexibility brought by SOC, modern service-based software systems are frequently required to be highly adaptable in order to cope with rapid changes and evolution of business goals, requirements, as well as physical context in a dynamic business environment. Unfortunately, adaptive systems are still difficult to build due to its high complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called MoDAR to support the development of dynamically adaptive service-based systems (DASS). Especially in this approach, we first model the functionality of a system by two constituent parts: i) a stable part called the base model described using business processes, and ii) a volatile part called the variable model described using business rules. This model reflects the fact that business processes and rules are two significant and complementary aspects of business requirements, and business rules are usually much more volatile than business processes. We then use an aspect-oriented approach to weave the base model and variable model together so that they can evolve independently without interfering with each other. A model-driven platform has been implemented to support the development lifecycle of a DASS from specification, design, to deployment and execution. Systems developed with the MoDAR platform are running on top of a BPEL process engine and a Drools rule engine. Experimentation shows that our approach brings high adaptability and maintainability to service-based systems with reasonable performance overhead.Jian Yu, Quan Z. Sheng, and Joshua K.Y. Swe