A wrapping approach for migrating legacy system interactive functionalities to Service Oriented Architectures

  • Authors:

  • Gerardo Canfora;Anna Rita Fasolino;Gianni Frattolillo;Porfirio Tramontana

  • Affiliations:

  • RCOST - Research Centre on Software Technology, University of Sannio, Palazzo ex Poste, via Traiano, 82100 Benevento, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universití di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio, 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universití di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio, 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universití di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio, 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Software systems modernisation using Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and Web Services represents a valuable option for extending the lifetime of mission-critical legacy systems. This paper presents a black-box modernisation approach for exposing interactive functionalities of legacy systems as Services. The problem of transforming the original user interface of the system into the request/response interface of a SOA is solved by a wrapper that is able to interact with the system on behalf of the user. The wrapper behaviour is defined in the form of Finite State Machines retrievable by black-box reverse engineering of the human-computer interface. The paper describes our wrapper-based migration process and discusses the results of case studies showing process effectiveness and quality of resulting services.