A Model-driven Approach for Generating RESTful Web Services in Single-Page Applications

Modern Single-Page Applications (SPA) use data from multiple Web services to support essential process in the enterprises. By using data from several Web services, the SPA changed their architecture from a one-to-one communication between client and server to an application using information from multiple servers using RESTfuls APIs in a microservice architecture. In this paper, we present a model-driven approach for the consumption of RESTful Web services in SPA. We introduce a Query Service meta-model and provide a tool to semi-automatically generate an SPA based on our reference architecture. The proposed approach was evaluated by using the tool for the development of an example application in the context of a research project with large German corporation in the domain of software architecture. The main limitation of the tool is the lack of support for the round-trip engineering functionality. However, the created Web service handles the access to APIs and reduces the complexity of the SPA due to the shift of responsibility away from the client.