STAGER: Semantic-Based Framework for Generating Adapters of Service-Based Generic-API for Portable Cloud Applications

In PaaS model, providers have different proprietary APIs, which make developers locked inside a specific platform and not able to easily port their applications among different platforms. So, vendor lock-in problem appeared. One solution to this problem is to use generic APIs with specific adapters. However, any update in a PaaS specific-API makes its corresponding adapter is unusable which causes, what we call, API synchronization problem. Therefore, STAGER (SemanTic-based GenERation of Generic-API Adapters) framework is proposed. STAGER framework provides a semi-automatic adapter generation process, which generates specific adapters of generic APIs for PaaS services (e.g., blob storage and datastore services) for target PaaS platforms. The adapter generation process is based on semantic annotations of the generic APIs and their corresponding PaaS specific-APIs. In order to evaluate STAGER framework, two generic APIs for blob storage and NoSQL datastore services have been proposed. STAGER framework is used to generate the adapters of these generic APIs for two PaaS platforms: Google App Engine (GAE) and Windows Azure. Although there is some overhead for semantically annotating the PaaS APIs, the evaluation results prove the feasibility of STAGER framework and promote the usage of the generated adapters for implementing portable cloud applications.