Modeling Cloud Messaging with a Domain-Specific Modeling Language

This paper introduces a domain-specific modeling language (DSL) for modeling application-level network protocols. Application-level messages may be expressed in object-oriented general-purpose programming languages as classes. Instances of these classes can be sent through the network with the help of a customized serialization process. However, protocols have several special characteristics that do not fit easily into this abstraction, for example, bitfields or specially encoded lists. Furthermore, the limitations of generic serialization frameworks inhibit using them for this purpose. These factors suggest creating a DSL that more easily expresses these protocols and allows for code generation to support application-level messaging. Application-level messaging is a crucial part of cloud services that follow the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm and it must be implemented at both clients and servers. A DSL that allows for efficient modeling of the messages and generating implementation code significantly simplifies the development of cloud applications.