A Model-Driven Method For Fast Building Consistent Web Services In Practice

Nowadays, lots of software companies rely on web technologies to test market hypothesis and develop viable businesses. They often need to quickly build web services that are at the core of their Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). MVPs must be reliable and are based on specifications and hypothesis that are likely to change. Model Driven Engineering approaches have been proposed and used to develop and evolve web services. However, these approaches lack the ability to be suitable for both (i) rapid prototyping, (ii) model verification and (iii) compatibility with common programming languages. Here we propose a meta-model to express web services and the related tool to verify models consistency. We adopt a shallow verification process to allow rapid prototyping by developers who are not formal methods experts, while still offering design-time guarantees that improve product quality and development efficiency. Web services are defined using parametric components which enable to express and formally verify web service patterns and to safely reuse them in other contexts. We built a tool to check consistency of models and associated components implementations in order to generate corresponding web services. This allows us to give flexibility to developers, as well as verification support and an easier onboarding for new developers.