Model-Driven Service Development for A-posteriori Application Integration

The integration of software applications constitutes a challenging task. In particular, this applies to an a-posteriori integration approach where existing legacy systems - possibly supplied by different vendors - are coupled. Responding to this challenge, the service-oriented paradigm defines an architectural style for the construction of a heterogeneous application landscape. By abstracting services, applications are made available at a clean level suitable for integration. In this paper a model-driven approach for service development is presented which yields a modeling formalism - realized as a programmed graph rewriting system - to specify service descriptions and service compositions and facilitates generation of executable program code. Moreover, the "approach" is not only confined to the conceptual level. Rather, the approach is realized by a collection of support tools and a respective tool infrastructure.