Component generator for the development of RESTful APIs

Abstract

Automating repetitive steps in the development process of any product is an engineering desideratum. Every software product has an early development stage consisting of creating components that allow the use of a set of predefined resources. We show that this stage can be automated, with a positive impact on implementation time and the prevention of possible logical or operational errors due to the human factor. We consider that by simply describing the entities (resources) that are to be used in the development process in a technical way, the whole source code with the implementations of CRUD operations on the previously defined resources will be obtained. The source code can be used as a starting point, reducing the time spent on repetitive details, which are usually standardized but rarely automated. The solution is to streamline the development process of RESTful APIs, and the method chosen to make this possible is automatic generation of software components. The proposed method is based on template-based code generation (TBCG) - creating templates that involve aggregating the code to be generated (static parts) with a high-level language (dynamic parts) that allows various operations, such as decision making, statement repetition and data transformation.