Top-Down Model-Driven Engineering of Web Services from Extended OpenAPI Models

Abstract

Web services engineering is a crucial subject, because web services are often built to be used by other programs; thus they should have a good documentation targeting developers. Furthermore, when building a digital product, engineers need to build several programs that interact with a central instance of web services. OpenAPI, a popular industry standard, makes possible to document web services in order to quickly make a prototype of the product. It allows a top-down process where developers iterate to build an OpenAPI model that describes the web services they want, and then implement both the web services and the programs that will consume them. However, when doing such rapid prototyping, developers tend to either skip this design phase and implement web services right away, or stop updating the OpenAPI model when the product is released; in both cases they cannot take advantage of having an OpenAPI model aligned with the implementation. We show how OpenAPI can be extended to add implementation details inside models. These extensions link services to assemblies of components that describe computations. Hence a top-down development process that keeps model and implementation aligned. Moreover, this makes possible for developers to benefit from more support features while keeping the same flexibility.