Leveraging Platform Basic Services in Cloud Application Platforms for the Development of Cloud Applications

Abstract

Cloud application platforms gain popularity and have the potential to alter the way service based cloud applications are developed involving utilisation of platform basic services. A platform basic service is considered as a piece of software, which provides certain functionality and is usually offered via a web API, e.g. e-mail, payment, authentication service. However, the proliferation and diversification of platform basic services and the available providers increase the challenge for the application developers to integrate them and deal with the heterogeneous providers' web APIs. Therefore, a new approach of developing applications should be adopted in which developers leverage multiple platform basic services independently from the target application platforms. To this end, this paper presents a development framework whose objective is to enable the consistent integration of the platform services, and to allow the seamless use of the concrete providers by alleviating the heterogeneities among them.