Web Services and APIs

Research on web services and APIs

Description

The goal in this line of research is to automate the creation of APIs and the interconnection between machines through APIs.

Projects

S-CASE

The project's goal was to automatically generate RESTful Web Services from multi-modal requirements (text, UML or flow diagrams) in order to increase the productivity and simplify the development process from inception to deployment and maintenance. More information can be found in the S-CASE website, while technical details can be found in this blog post.

The main outcomes of this project were: the reqs2code methodology. Input in the form of textual requirements and graphical storyboards is analyzed using natural language processing techniques and semantics, to semi-automatically produce a RESTful, ready-to-deploy web service through Model Driven Engineering transformations.

Further more we augmented the reqs2code methodology and platform with RESTsec, a Low-Code platform that supports rapid security requirements modelling and which, in a few words, adds ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control) authorization capabilities to the produced RESTful service.

Gherkin2OAS

In this work (paper and code can be found below) we tried to automatically create RESTful APIs based on specifications written in a more human readable format, that of a Behavior Driven Development language like Gherkin.

Related Publications

2018

journal Christoforos Zolotas, Kyriakos C. Chatzidimitriou, Andreas L. Symeonidis: RESTsec: a low-code platform for generating secure by design enterprise services, 2018, Enterprise Information Systems [DOI: 10.1080/17517575.2018.1462403]
conference Anastasios Dimanidis, Kyriakos C. Chatzidimitriou, Andreas L. Symeonidis: A Natural Language Driven Approach for Automated Web API Development, 2018, WWW '18 Companion: The 2018 Web Conference Companion [PDF] [Code] [DOI: 10.1145/3184558.3191654]

Accepted for presentation in the 9th International Workshop on Web APIs and Service Architecture (WS-REST 2018). Published in WWW2018 Proceedings © 2018 International World Wide Web Conference Committee, published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.

2017

journal Christoforos Zolotas, Themistoklis Diamantopoulos, Kyriakos C. Chatzidimitriou, Andreas L. Symeonidis: From requirements to source code: a Model-Driven Engineering approach for RESTful web services, 2017, Automated Software Engineering, 24(4), pp. 791-738 [PDF] [Code] [DOI: 10.1007/s10515-016-0206-x]

Diploma Theses

I've worked on the subject with diploma theses students in the following proejcts: