Supporting Reuse of Smart Contracts through Service Orientation and Assisted Development

This paper focuses on two of the key challenges a developer encounters when reusing smart contracts: finding actionable information about existing smart contracts (descriptors) and writing the necessary integration logic to invoke selected contracts and implement missing functions. As for the former issue, the paper proposes a smart contract description format that allows the developer to search for publicly available contracts, understand which features a contract exposes and how to invoke them, according to a service-oriented approach. For the latter, the paper implements a simple, model-driven development environment consisting in a visual programming editor that provides a set of modeling constructs encoding specific, reuse-oriented code patterns. The approach is implemented and demonstrated in the context of the blockchain platform Ethereum and its programming language Solidity. The results obtained show that the proposed approach can be beneficial in the development of composite smart contracts and generic blockchain applications.