Conference Paper

Experience with a model-driven approach for enterprise-wide interface specification and XML schema generation

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Abstract

Market drivers to deliver software-based business solutions faster and cheaper have promoted the evolution of software system architectures toward assemblies of encapsulated components offering well-defined services - a service-oriented architecture. Software vendors are eager to adopt and exploit new technologies, such as XML and Web services, to meet the market demands, but face significant challenges due to their existing software asset base and entrenched development processes. This paper presents a case study of the use of a methodology and toolset, known as CAIDE (Computer Aided Interface Design Environment), developed to address these challenges for a complex family of telecommunications applications. Our main objective was to provide a simple but expressive high-level meta-model for specifying system interfaces, and to automatically generate XML schemas for the interfaces consistently across the application family, constraining the use of schema constructs according to enterprise-wide policies, and promoting reuse by composition.

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... This has lead to the creation of a huge amount of both on and off line XML documents for many purposes such as exchanging data or messages between different applications. These applications also require corresponding XML schema definitions with each of these XML instance documents for the purpose of validation [4]. Generating these XML schemas for each XML instance is a laborious task which needs a lot of human expert time [6]. ...
... Tools such as Visual Studio XMLSpy [12], Stylus Studio [11] etc. are capable of generating XML Schemas automatically. Though different tools are able to generate XML schemas automatically, still those tools lack the capability of producing schema with high accuracy and with matching requirements [4]. It will be correct for the document but there might be instances where the document can vary while still remaining valid. ...
... Method used in [4] uses a domain model by means of database tables. However, the main problem with the database approach is that though it works fine for a single enterprise, database structure may have to be changed for a different enterprise. ...
... With the advantages of shorter development cycle, low implementation cost, and fewer code faults, automatic code generation quickly became popular in both industry and academia. More recently, we see various generators for the code synthesis of user interface [14], XML schema (CAIDE) [4], and statistical analysis tools (NASA AutoBayes) [10]. A recent development in modeling and code generation is metamodeling frameworks that produce domain-specific generators based on particular domain knowledge. ...
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Object Management Group. Model Driven Architecture (MDA). OMG Document ormsc/2001–07–01
  • Management Object
  • Group