Abstract
Web 2.0 phenomenon, REST APIs and growing mobile service consumption, among other factors, are leading the development of web applications to a new paradigm, named cross-device web application. Those web sites let organizations of all sizes provide a pervasive and contextual access to their information and services, to customers, employees and partners via potentially any kind of device. Most organizations often possess legacy systems which should face an ongoing evolution process to enhance its accessibility and interoperability. Yesterday they had to evolve to provide the user with a Web layer, and now they should evolve again to adapt to the new ways of data and services consumption on the Web. In such scenario, a REST API plays a key role, defining the interaction layer between the legacy system and all its heterogeneous front ends. This work presents a model-driven approach to derive a REST API from a legacy web application within the frame defined by a modernization process. This approach departs from a conceptual model of the legacy application generated by reverse engineering techniques. In this work we detail the API generation process and provide a sample implementation instrumenting one of the studied web development frameworks to evaluate the suitability of the approach.
Work funded by Spanish Contract MIGRARIA - TIN2011-27340 at Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and Gobierno de Extremadura (GR-10129) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
Chapter PDF
References
Barros, A.P., Dumas, M.: The rise of web service ecosystems. IT Professional 8(5), 31–37 (2006)
Ceri, S., Fraternali, P., Matera, M., Maurino, A.: Designing multi-role, collaborative web sites with webml: a conference management system case study. In: 1st Workshop on Web-oriented Software Technology (2001)
Engelke, C., Fitzgerald, C.: Replacing legacy web services with RESTful services. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on RESTful Design - WS-REST 2010, vol. 5, p. 27 (2010)
Fielding, R.T.: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine (2000)
Jouault, F., Kurtev, I.: Transforming models with ATL. In: Bruel, J.-M. (ed.) MoDELS 2005. LNCS, vol. 3844, pp. 128–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Liu, Y., Wang, Q., Zhuang, M., Zhu, Y.: Reengineering Legacy Systems with RESTful Web Service. In: 2008 32nd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (2100219007), pp. 785–790 (2008)
Mesbah, A., Van Deursen, A.: An architectural style for ajax. In: The Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, WICSA 2007, p. 9. IEEE (2007)
Rodríguez-Echeverría, R., Conejero, J.M., Clemente, P.J., Pavón, V.M., Sánchez-Figueroa, F.: Model Driven Extraction of the Navigational Concern of Legacy Web Applications. In: Grossniklaus, M., Wimmer, M. (eds.) ICWE 2012 Workshops. LNCS, vol. 7703, pp. 56–70. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Rodríguez-Echeverría, R., Conejero, J.M., Clemente, P.J., Preciado, J.C., Sánchez-Figueroa, F.: Modernization of legacy web applications into rich internet applications. In: Harth, A., Koch, N. (eds.) ICWE 2011. LNCS, vol. 7059, pp. 236–250. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Rossi, G., Pastor, O., Schwabe, D., Olsina, L.: Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications (Human-Computer Interaction Series) (October 2007)
Szymanski, C., Schreier, S.: Case Study: Extracting a Resource Model from an Object-Oriented Legacy Application (2012)
Ulrich, W.: Modernization Standards Roadmap, pp. 46–64 (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rodríguez-Echeverría, R., Macías, F., Pavón, V.M., Conejero, J.M., Sánchez-Figueroa, F. (2013). Model-Driven Generation of a REST API from a Legacy Web Application. In: Sheng, Q.Z., Kjeldskov, J. (eds) Current Trends in Web Engineering. ICWE 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8295. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04243-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04244-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)