Tool chain for application development with name-centric services

Abstract

Regarding service oriented architectures various tool chains evolved in the last decades. However, in terms of content-centric approaches tools and middleware are in an early stage. Especially tool support for name-centric services in future heterogeneous networks is not available. Future networks will cover future Internet, wireless sensor networks, mobile and ubiquitous applications. Existing content-centric networking provides powerful, flexible, but heavyweight APIs to the developers but does not cover middleware and tool chains for services. Therefore, we implement a solution for application development with name-centric services based on an existing content-centric networking protocol. We design a lightweight service description based on JSON which is short and can be easily understood. We implement a complete tool chain for automatic code generation for server and client applications. We demonstrate the workflow, the convenience for the application developer and the effectiveness of our approach in a convincing application example. A first evaluation of the code generation reveals a prediction of logical lines of code and illustrates the complexity of the problem that is now solved automatically. Our approach is proven to simplify and advance the application development process for name-centric services.