Legacy programs, i. e. programs which have been developed with an outdated technology make-up for the vast majority of programs in many user application environments. It is these programs which actually run the information systems of the business world. Moving to a new technology such as service oriented architecture is impossible without taking these programs along. This contribution presents a tool supported method for achieving that goal. Legacy code is wrapped behind an XML shell which allows individual functions within the programs, to be offered as Web services to any external user. By means of this wrapping technology, a significant part of the company software assets can be preserved within the framework of a service oriented architecture.

Integrating legacy software into a service oriented architecture

Embodiments of systems and methods model and generate open reusable, business components (410) for Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) from existing client/server applications (401). Applications are decomposed into business component frameworks (405) with separate user interface, business logic, and event management layers to enable service-oriented development of new enterprise applications (425). Such layers are re-assembled through an open standards-based, Native Application Services (NAS) (420) to render similar or near identical transactional functionality within a new application on an open platform (425), without breaking former production code, and without requiring a change in an end-user's business processes and/or user experience. In addition, the same separated layers may form re-usable business components at any desired level of granularity (416) for re-use in external composite applications (435) through industry-standard interfaces, regardless of usage, context, or complexity in the former client/server application (401).

Systems and methods for modeling and generating reusable application component frameworks, and automated assembly of service-oriented applications from existing applications

Many testing and analysis techniques use finite state models to validate and verify the quality of software systems. Since the specification of such models is complex and time-consuming, researchers defined several techniques to extract finite state models from code and traces. Automatically generating models requires much less effort than designing them, and thus eases the verification and validation of large software systems. However, when models are inferred automatically, the precision of the mining process is critical. Behavioral models mined with imprecise processes can include many spurious behaviors, and can thus compromise the results of testing and analysis techniques that use those models. In this paper, we increase the precision of automata inferred from execution traces, by leveraging two learning techniques. We first mine execution traces to infer statistically significant temporal properties that capture relations between non consecutive and possibly distant events. We then incrementally refine a simple initial automaton by merging likely equivalent states. We identify equivalent states by analyzing set of consecutive events, and we use the inferred temporal properties to evaluate whether two equivalent states can be merged or not. We merge equivalent states only if the merging does violate any temporal property, since a merging that violates temporal properties is likely to introduce an imprecise generalization. Our generalization process that preserves temporal properties while merging states avoids breaking non-local relations, and thus solves one of the major cause of overgeneralized models. Thus, mined properties steer the learning of behavioral models. The technique is completely automated and generates an automaton that both accepts the input traces and satisfies the mined temporal properties. We evaluated our solution by comparing models inferred with and without checking mined temporal properties. Results show that our steering process can significantly improve precision without noticeable loss of recall.

/pdf/automatic-steering-of-behavioral-model-inference-2f18xgnypb.pdf

Automatic steering of behavioral model inference

Knowledge Discovery Metamodel-ISO/IEC 19506: A standard to modernize legacy systems

Successful software maintenance is becoming increasingly critical due to the increasing dependence of our society and economy on software systems. One key problem of software maintenance is the difficulty in understanding the evolving software systems. Program workflows can help system operators and administrators to understand system behaviors and verify system executions so as to greatly facilitate system maintenance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to automatically discover program workflows from event traces that record system events during system execution. Different from existing workflow mining algorithms, our approach can construct concurrent workflows from traces of interleaved events. Our workflow mining approach is a three-step coarse-to-fine algorithm. At first, we mine temporal dependencies for each pair of events. Then, based on the mined pair-wise tem-poral dependencies, we construct a basic workflow model by a breadth-first path pruning algorithm. After that, we refine the workflow by verifying it with all training event traces. The re-finement algorithm tries to find out a workflow that can interpret all event traces with minimal state transitions and threads. The results of both simulation data and real program data show that our algorithm is highly effective.

/pdf/mining-program-workflow-from-interleaved-traces-5fi0bzky0a.pdf

Mining program workflow from interleaved traces

A business process attempts to encapsulate the delivery of a sequence of tasks, typically starting from accepting a service request and ending at certain points, such as the completion of the service. We propose a model-driven business process recovery framework that captures the essential functional features representing a business process. The framework utilizes static tracing techniques and a number of heuristics to map source code entities to high-level business process entities. A case study is preformed to recover IBM/spl reg/ WebSphere/spl reg/ Business Integration business processes from IBM WebSphere Commerce code. The experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

https://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~kkontog/publications/conferences/C1-2004.pdf

Model-driven business process recovery

With the rapid changes that occur in the area of Web technologies, the porting and adaptation of existing Web applications into new platforms that take advantage of modern technologies has become an issue of increasing importance This paper presents a reengineering framework whose target system is an architecture based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern and enabled for the Java/spl trade/ 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) The proposed framework is mainly concerned with the decomposition of a legacy Web application by identifying software components to be transformed into Java objects such as JavaBeans, JavaServer Pages (JSP), and Java Servlet

https://www.softlab.ntua.gr/~kkontog/publications/conferences/C2-2003.pdf

Transforming legacy Web applications to the MVC architecture

As technology evolves over time, a common problem is the migration of software applications from one technology base to another This paper is a practical experience report based on IBM NetCommerce to WebSphere Commerce Suite (WCS) migration It identifies the problems and issues in the migration of applications using traditional database access (SQL) to applications using the Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) programming model, and presents a practical methodology in facilitating such migration It also describes a tool built on this methodology that has been released on IBM's alphaWorks site From the experience so gained, this paper points to a number of future enhancement areas in the methodology and associated technology research

http://jlu.myweb.cs.uwindsor.ca/pub/cascon.pdf

Migrating E-commerce database applications to an enterprise Java environment

As Web technologies advance, the porting and adaptation of existing Web applications to take advantage of the advancement has become an issue of increasing importance. Examples of such technology advancement include extensible architectural designs, more efficient caching protocols, and provision for customizable dynamic content delivery. This paper presents an experience report on the migration of legacy IBM® Net.Data® based applications to new enterprise JavaTM environments. In this respect, a Net.Data application is refactored into JavaBeansTM (Model), JavaServer PagesTM (View), and Java ServletTM (Controller). To evaluate the effectiveness of the migration methodology, a tool has been developed to support the automatic translation of Net.Data to JavaServer Pages. Using such a tool, a case study is presented to deal with IBM WebSphere® Commerce applications.

http://cs.uwindsor.ca/~jlu/CASCON2003.pdf

Migration of legacy web applications to enterprise Java TM environments net.data® to JSP TM transformation

A business software application often has two perspectives: the business flow and operation that the application intends to solve, and the source code and its design and flow upon which the application is built. As one changes and evolves, the other needs to be synchronized. This paper addresses an approach to synchronize these two models for effective software maintenance.

T.C. Lau

Papers

Model-driven business process recovery

Transforming legacy Web applications to the MVC architecture

Migrating E-commerce database applications to an enterprise Java environment

Migration of legacy web applications to enterprise Java TM environments net.data® to JSP TM transformation

Model synchronization for efficient software application maintenance