A multilayered model for REST applications

Abstract

Representational State Transfer (REST) web services rapidly increased their importance in the last years. Nowadays a lot of services use this architectural style to benefit from the advantages and characteristics of a RESTful system. To call a web service REST compliant several constraints have to be fulfilled by software developers. The compliance of these guidelines is often not ensured even though many services call themselves RESTful. By applying Model Driven Software Development aspects to the design of REST applications a system was developed to decrease the effort which is needed to follow those constraints and reduce the time it takes to design and implement a REST web service. The process involves the modeling and editing of several abstract models which act as an input for a code generator that creates a JAX-RS web service. The models are defined by using the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) with additions for graphical modeling. Since the current outcome of the existing prototype is not completely REST compliant certain improvements have to be made. This thesis reveals flaws during the modeling process in several meta models and in their transformations. It states enhancements how to improve and ease the process as well as increasing the quality and REST compliance of the generated outcome. To verifiy an improved state of the software a show case is used as a reference throughout the document. Finally the applied changes to the approach and the system structure are realized and demonstrated regarding this show case.