Model-driven web service development

Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of inter-organizational interactions. However, despite the growing interest, several issues still need to be addressed to provide Web services with benefits similar to what traditional middle-ware brings to intra-organizational application integration. In this paper, we present a framework that supports the model-driven development of Web services. Specifically, we show how, starting from the external specifications of a Web service (e.g., interface and protocol specifications), we can support the generation of extensible service implementation templates as well as of complete (executable) service specifications, thereby considerably simplifying the service development work.