Dynamic Provisioning of REST APIs for Model Management

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of providing RESTful services for model management in Model-Driven Engineering without requiring pre-known models. It introduces a dynamic provisioning middleware that uses model reflection and GenModel-based code generation to create REST APIs on demand from metamodels. The architecture is a three-layer, Spring Boot-inspired system with a stateless CRUD core and a Model Validator, exposed via Swagger for discoverability. The proposed approach enables modeling-as-a-service by allowing on-the-fly API generation and suggests future work on validation, distributed storage, and cross-domain applications.

Abstract

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering methodology focusing on models as primary artifacts. In the last years, the emergence of Web technologies has led to the development of Web-based modeling tools and model-based approaches for the Web that offer a web-based environment to create and edit models or model-based low-code solutions. A common requirement when developing Web-based modeling tools is to provide a fast and efficient way for model management, and this is particularly a hot topic in model-based system engineering. However, the number of approaches offering RESTful services for model management is still limited. Among the alternatives for developing distributed services, there is a growing interest in the use of RESTful services. In this paper, we present an approach to provide RESTful services for model management that can be used to interact with any kind of model and can be used to build a modeling platform providing modeling-as-a-service. The approach follows the REST principles to provide a stateless and scalable service.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Architecture of our approach