MDA-Based Tool Chain for Web Services Development

One of the challenges in Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is the variety of tools which are not interoperable with each other. Also, a design flow supporting different phases of MDA-based development is often missing. This paper presents a tool chain and design flow for MDA-based Web Services development. The presented tool chain covers modeling with domain-specific Unified Modeling Language (UML) profiles, transformation of the UML models into Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) files, and Java code generation. The tool chain is validated in a case study where it is used in the development of a web service called Resource Availability Service (RAS). In the validation, the tool chain worked well, since the proportion of generated code in RAS is over 95%. The residual 5% of the code includes manual integration and business logic. User experiences indicate that using the tool chain improves the developer productivity in Web Services development.