User Interface Migration of Microsoft Windows Applications

  • Authors:

  • John Gerdes, Jr

  • Affiliations:

  • (Associate Professor) Technology Support and Training Management, School of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, U.S.A.

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

When migrating a legacy application to a new platform, it is often necessary to recreate the application due to the unavailability of the source code. While there is extensive research addressing the migration of the program logic and modeling of user interface (UI) dynamics, there is limited research dealing with the recreation of the physical graphical user interface. This work investigates to what extent low-level application programming interface calls and graphical comparison techniques can detect and identify objects in the executable version of the legacy application, and then recreate that UI in a new application. Results are reported from an empirical test of 20 applications from multiple software vendors. Findings indicate that the ability to identify objects is dependent on the development platform originally used to create the legacy application. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.