Migrating legacy data structures based on variable overlay to Java

  • Authors:

  • Mariano Ceccato;Thomas Roy Dean;Paolo Tonella;Davide Marchignoli

  • Affiliations:

  • Fondazione Bruno Kessler—IRST, via Sommarive 18, 38050 Povo, Trento, Italy;Queen's University, Kingston, Canada;Fondazione Bruno Kessler—IRST, via Sommarive 18, 38050 Povo, Trento, Italy;Informatica Bancaria Trentina, Trento, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2008)
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Legacy information systems, such as banking systems, are usually organized around their data model. Hence, when these systems are migrated to modern environments, translation of the data model involves the most critical decisions, having strong implications on the rest of the translation. In this paper, we report our experience and describe the approaches adopted in migrating a large banking system (ten million lines of code) to Java, starting from a proprietary data model which gives programmers explicit control of the variable overlay in memory. After presenting the basic translation scheme, we discuss the exceptions that may occur in practice. Then, we consider two heuristic approaches useful to reduce the number of cases where a behavior equivalent to that of unions must be reproduced in Java. Finally, we comment on the experimental results obtained so far. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In this paper, we report our experience and describe the approaches adopted in migrating a large banking system to Java, starting from a proprietary data model, which gives programmers explicit control of the variable overlay in memory. We consider two heuristics useful to reduce the number of cases where a behavior equivalent to that of unions must be reproduced in Java. We discuss the experimental results obtained so far. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.