Model-Driven Development of REST APIs

Abstract

The domain of REST APIs contains highly repetitive code which needs to be written ev- ery time there is a need for a new REST API. When developing client-side applications, like web applications or native applications, one must also create a robust REST API in order to share the data between all the clients. The server-side technology takes a huge part of the budget and in most cases it is not the main product- the client-side application is. The author is trying to solve this problem by applying the Model-Driven Develop- ment paradigm. A code generator specifically designed for the domain is proposed and developed. The code generator has some unique features such as GitHub integration and mechanisms to structure the files in the same way as human would do. This has been achieved by analyzing the human created file structure. The generated REST API comes also with an option of automatically testing behavior compared to best practices. This is done by taking an existing solution and further researching its use.