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Towards a UML and IFML Mapping to GraphQL

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10544))

Abstract

Web APIs have become first-class citizens on the Web, in particular, to provide a more unified access to heterogeneous data sources that organizations want to make publicly available. While REST APIs have become the norm to structure web APIs, they can be regarded as a server-side solution, offering default limited query capabilities and therefore forcing developers to implement ad-hoc solutions for clients requiring to perform complex queries on the data. Lately, GraphQL has gained popularity as a way to simplify this work. GraphQL is a query language for Web APIs specially designed to build client applications by providing an intuitive and flexible syntax for describing their data schema, requirements and interactions. In this paper we propose an approach for the generation of GraphQL schemas from UML class diagrams and IFML interaction models, two well-known standard modeling languages in the web engineering field, to facilitate the creation of web applications relying on this new GraphQL paradigm following a model-based approach. While UML is used to generate the GraphQL schema, IFML is used to derive the set of queries and modifications to be performed on that schema.

This work has been supported by the Spanish government (ref. TIN2016-75944-R).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://facebook.github.io/graphql/.

  2. 2.

    http://graphql.org/learn.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/SOM-Research/graphQL-xtext-grammar/releases/tag/0.1.

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Correspondence to Roberto Rodriguez-Echeverria .

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Rodriguez-Echeverria, R., Cánovas Izquierdo, J.L., Cabot, J. (2018). Towards a UML and IFML Mapping to GraphQL. In: Garrigós, I., Wimmer, M. (eds) Current Trends in Web Engineering. ICWE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10544. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74433-9_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74433-9_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74432-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74433-9

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