Model-driven design and deployment of service-enabled web applications

Significant effort is currently invested in application integration, enabling business processes of different companies to interact and form complex multiparty processes. Web service standards, based on WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), have been adopted as process-to-process communication paradigms. However, the conceptual modeling of applications using Web services has not yet been addressed. Interaction with Web services is often specified at the level of the source code; thus, Web service interfaces are buried within a programmatic specification. In this article, we argue that Web services should be considered first-class citizens in the specification of Web applications. Thus, service-enabled Web applications should benefit from the high-level modeling and automatic code generation techniques that have long been advocated for Web application design and implementation. To this end, we extend a declarative model for specifying data-intensive Web applications in two directions: (i) high-level modeling of Web services and their interactions with the Web applications which use them, and (ii) modeling and specification of Web applications implementing new, complex Web services. Our approach is fully implemented within a CASE tool allowing the high-level modeling and automatic deployment of service-enabled Web applications.