Restoration Software Transforming Legacy Software to Web Services Principle Investigators Leo Mark - Georgia Tech, Spencer Rugaber, Georgia Tech, Wayne Summers, Columbus State, Graduate Research Assistants John Gibby, Georgia Tech Harihar Karthik, Columbus State Robert Liu, Georgia Tech Sponsors AFLAC Georgia Research Alliance Columbus Information Processing Innovation Center
Problem: Transforming legacy assets Corporate assets “tied up in” legacy software systems Complex, undocumented, monolithic Not up-to-date wrt evolving technologies Legacy technologyNew technology CICS “green screens” Web access VSAM, IMS, DB2 XML Cobol business logic Java Mainframe Web services Monolithic Layered, modular
Solution Methodology for transforming legacy information systems Guidelines consisting of Separating the user interface aspects of software from the business logic Extracting the enterprise data model Specifying and encapsulating provided services Creating, maintaining and evolving the enterprise integration architecture
Case Study Vertical slice of Cobol system for Reconciliation of invoice records for customer groups Program understanding; representation; reengineering into J2EE prototype Output Methodology + Process data + Prototype
Distributed Multi-tier Architecture [from java.sun.com/j2ee]
Research Questions How to understand undocumented code? How to transform existing, running systems to use modern technology? How to loosen exclusive control over data to allow 24/7 use? How to re-architect batch, mainframe systems to interactive GUIs? What automation can support these tasks? How to transfer this method from a research team to actual developers?