Leveraging Early Aspects in End-to-End Model Driven Development for Non-Functional Properties in Service Oriented Architecture

Abstract

In Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), each application is often designed with a set of reusable services and a business process. In order to retain the reusability of services, it is important to separate non-functional properties of applications (e.g., security and reliability) from their functional properties. This paper investigates an end-to-end model-driven development framework that separates non-functional properties from functional properties and consistently manages them from high-level business processes to low-level implementation configurations. This framework proposes two key components: (1) a programming language, called BALLAD, for a new per-process strategy to specify non-functional properties for business processes and (2) a graphical modeling method, called FM-SNFPs, to define a series of constraints among non-functional properties. BALLAD leverages the notion of aspects in aspect oriented programming/modeling. Each aspect is used to specify a set of non-functional properties that crosscut multiple services in a business process. FM-SNFPs leverages the notion of feature modeling in order to explicitly define constraints among non-functional properties such as dependency and mutual exclusion constraints. BALLAD and FM-SNFPs can free application developers from manually specifying, maintaining and validating non-functional properties and constraints for services one by one, thereby reducing the burdens/costs in development and maintenance of service-oriented applications. This paper describes the design details of BALLAD and FM-SNFPs, and demonstrates how they are used in developing service-oriented applications. Empirical evaluation results show that BALLAD significantly reduces the costs to implement and maintain non-functional properties in service-oriented applications. BALLAD and FM-SNFPs are designed and implemented efficient and scalable.