Feature Model for the Service Provider in the Service Oriented Architecture

A widely used approach to develop a Service Provider (SP) in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), called contract-first, consists of designing service contracts that will be used to generate the SP source code. The goal of a service contract is expressing the features (e.g., services and capabilities) of the required SP. The two most known traditional service contracts in the literature are: WSDL and WADL. We identify that these service contracts suffer from several problems, such as they only allow expressing a limited set of features. In order to overcome such problems, we propose a Feature Model (FM), named FMSP, that can be considered as a service contract for SP. The features of FMSP are designed to generate valid, customized and fully functional SPs. A key point in our FMSP is that it relies on SOA Design Patterns (DPs) to define its features. The constraints expressed between the DPs in our FMSP allow to easily developing valid compound DPs in the SP. Because DPs are proven solutions, then our FMSP will generate proven SPs as well. We evaluate our FMSP through a practical case study. The results show that the advantage of our FMSP compared with the traditional service contracts is, it permits to automatically generates valid, customized, fully functional and based-DP SPs in a short time.