A concept for generating simplified RESTful interfaces

Today, innovative companies are forced to evolve their software systems faster and faster, either for providing customer services and products or for supporting internal processes. At the same time, already existing, maybe even legacy systems are crucial for different reasons and by that cannot be abolished easily. While integrating legacy software into new systems in general is considered by well-known approaches like SOA (service-oriented architecture), at the best of our knowledge, it lacks of ways to make legacy systems available for remote clients like smart phones or embedded devices. In this paper, we propose an approach to leverage heterogeneous (legacy) applications by adding RESTful web-based interfaces in a model-driven way. We introduce an additional application layer, which encapsulates services of one or several existing applications, and provides a unified, web-based, and seamless interface. This interface is modelled in our own DSL (domain-specific language), the belonging code generator produces productive Java code. Finally, we report on an case study proving our concept by means of an e-bike sharing service.

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