Experience with a model-driven approach for enterprise-wide interface specification and XML schema generation

Market drivers to deliver software-based business solutions faster and cheaper have promoted the evolution of software system architectures toward assemblies of encapsulated components offering well-defined services - a service-oriented architecture. Software vendors are eager to adopt and exploit new technologies, such as XML and Web services, to meet the market demands, but face significant challenges due to their existing software asset base and entrenched development processes. This paper presents a case study of the use of a methodology and toolset, known as CAIDE (Computer Aided Interface Design Environment), developed to address these challenges for a complex family of telecommunications applications. Our main objective was to provide a simple but expressive high-level meta-model for specifying system interfaces, and to automatically generate XML schemas for the interfaces consistently across the application family, constraining the use of schema constructs according to enterprise-wide policies, and promoting reuse by composition.