Model Driven Development of Web Services and Dynamic Web Services Composition; Doctoral thesis

摘要

Web Services (WS) has emerged as a new component-based software development paradigm in a network-centric environment based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the open standard description language XML and transportation protocol HTML. Therefore, legacy software systems can incorporate WS technology in order to be reused and integrated in a distributed environment across heterogeneous platforms. While WS is gaining its momentum toward wide adoption in the software industry, there are two critical issues yet to be addressed before its power is fully unleashed: 1) the migration of legacy distributed software system toward WS applications; 2) the innovation of new infrastructure, and languages in support of WS application development. The contribution of this dissertation is in these two directions. First, a comprehensive, systematic, automatable and language neutral approach is presented toward reengineering legacy software systems to WS applications, rather than rewriting the whole legacy software system from scratch in an ad- hoc, language-specific manner. It is noteworthy that this approach is not specific to reengineering WS applications, but can be generalized to reengineering legacy software systems to other applications. Moreover, this approach offers a means for modeling assets exchange in both horizontal direction and vertical direction (along the meta-model stack).