Feature model for the service provider in the service oriented architecture
Akram Kamoun, Mohamed Hadj Kacem, Ahmed Hadj Kacem · 2016
A widely used approach to develop a Service Provider (SP) in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), called contract-first, consists of designing service contracts that will be used to generate the SP source code. The goal of a service contract is expressing the features (e.g., services and capabilities) of the required SP. The two most known traditional service contracts in the literature are: WSDL and WADL. We identify that these service contracts suffer from several problems, such as they only allow expressing a limited set of features. In order to overcome such problems, we propose a Feature Model (FM), named FMsp, that can be considered as a service contract for SP. The features of FMspare designed to generate valid, customized and fully functional SPs. A key point in our FMspis that it relies on SOA Design Patterns (DPs) to define its features. The constraints expressed between the DPs in our FMspallow to easily developing valid compound DPs in the SP. Because DPs are proven solutions, then our FMspwill generate proven SPs as well. We evaluate our FMspthrough a practical case study. The results show that the advantage of our FMspcompared with the traditional service contracts is, it permits to automatically generates valid, customized, fully functional and based-DP SPs in a short time.