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The adoption of the Internet technologies favors the diffusion of Web-based applications. However, the development of new applications exploiting the modern interfaces and distribution channels have to face the problems connected with the integration of existing software systems. This aspect often requires the migration of legacy systems toward the...
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... Figure 2, an example of the use of the callableProgram interface is shown. Figure 2 shows at the top the CalledFromCobol Java code called from the CALLJAVA COBOL program shown at the bottom of the Figure. When the control flow reaches the CALL instruction, the control is transferred to the first instruction of the Java method The Cobol parameters are transferred as an instance of the parameterList class, to which the Java program can access in read and write mode through set and get ...
Context 2
... Figure 2, an example of the use of the callableProgram interface is shown. Figure 2 shows at the top the CalledFromCobol Java code called from the CALLJAVA COBOL program shown at the bottom of the Figure. When the control flow reaches the CALL instruction, the control is transferred to the first instruction of the Java method The Cobol parameters are transferred as an instance of the parameterList class, to which the Java program can access in read and write mode through set and get ...
Citations
... Major non-proprietary frameworks "lack sufficient SME relevance" (Nussbaumer and Liu, 2013). (Bodhuin et al., 2002;Bodhuin et al., 2003) state that their approach is in the context of "a research project aimed at defining new technological solutions to be transferred to Small and Medium Enterprises operating in the Information and Communication Technologies", (Mohagheghi and Saether, 2011;Lucia et al., 2006;Lucia et al., 2008) report on use cases from SME partners without explicit consideration of SME characteristics in their approaches. mentions SMEs for motivating their work by naming SaaS advantages for SMEs. ...
... X X X X (Canfora et al., 2008) X X X (Amalfitano et al., 2014) X X X X (Strobl et al., 2009) X X X (Rocha et al., 2015) X X X (Vavliakis et al., 2011;Tzvetkov and Xiong Wang, 2005;Choi et al., 2010;Zhao et al., 2014a;Vavliakis et al., 2013;Li et al., 2014;Zhao et al., 2014b;Xuan Fan et al., 2010;Li, 2010) X X (Lucia et al., 2006;Babar and Chauhan, 2011) X X X (Tran et al., 2011;Wu et al., 2014;Mateescu et al., 2014;Alonso et al., 2013;Hajjat et al., 2010;Vu and Asal, 2012;Rowe et al., 2013;Khajeh-Hosseini et al., 2012;Bai et al., 2013) X X (Rodriguez et al., 2011) X X (Upadhyaya et al., 2011) X X X (Frey and Hasselbring, 2010) X X X (Bovenzi et al., 2003;Zhang et al., 2010;Millham, 2010;Pérez-Castillo et al., 2013) X X X (Zhuopeng Zhang and Hongji Yang, 2004;Aversano et al., 2001b) X X X X (Sosa et al., 2013;Chen et al., 2005;Ping et al., 2003a;Ping et al., 2003b;Lorenzo et al., 2007) X X X X (Puder, 2006;Puder, 2004;Glander et al., 2013;Karampaglis et al., 2014) X X (Wendland et al., 2013) X X UI P D I S RA LA TD Sel Imp T Dep (Zhang et al., 2008;Hsueh et al., 2013;Parsa and Ghods, 2008;Cai et al., 2015;Ricca and Marchetto, 2009;Chenghao et al., 2010;Ruimin Liu et al., 2004;Tak and Tang, 2014;Tilevich et al., 2005;Yalezo and Thinyane, 2013;Baliś et al., 2008;Koschel et al., 2009;Bodhuin et al., 2002;Tibermacine and Kerdoudi, 2012;Bodhuin et al., 2003;Nugraheni, 2013;del Castillo et al., 2009;Canfora et al., 2004;Bodhuin and Tortorella, 2004;He Guo et al., 2005) X X (Cachero et al., 2001) X X X Stroulia et al., 2002) X X (Karnitis and Arnicans, 2015) X X X (Moore and Moshkina, 2000) X X X X (Khadka et al., 2011) X X X X X X X X (Almonaies et al., 2011;Jianzhi Li and Hongji Yang, 2005) X X X X (Menychtas et al., 2013) X X X X X (Distante et al., 2002;Distante et al., 2006) X X X X (Beserra et al., 2012) X X X X (Hoyer et al., 2009;Zhang et al., 2005) X X X X (Huang et al., 2014;Frey et al., 2013;Canfora et al., 2006;Pfitzmann and Joukov, 2011;Paiano et al., 2011;Sosa-Sanchez et al., 2014;Hasselbring et al., 2004) X X (Sneed, 2008) X X X X X (Stroulia et al., 2003) X X X (Strauch et al., 2013;Lucia et al., 2008;Bernhart et al., 2012;Mohagheghi and Saether, 2011;Marchetto and Ricca, 2008) X X X X X X X X ...
... The DISPLAY and ACCEPT statements have to be replaced by calls to a Java class which describes and handles the GUI with set and get operations. These are referred to as screen proxies and can be traced to the work of Bodhuin and Totorella at RCOST [3]. Every reference to a map field in the COBOL program must also be converted to a reference to the set or get operation for that particular field. ...
This paper describes an industrial project aimed at migrating legacy COBOL programs running on an IBM-AS400 to Java for running in an open environment. The unique aspect of this migration is the reengineering of the COBOL code prior to migration. The programs were in their previous form hardwired to the AS400 screens as well as to the AS400 file system. The goal of the reengineering project was to free the code from these proprietary dependencies and to reduce them to the pure business logic. Disentangling legacy code from it's physical environment is a major prerequisite to converting that code to another environment. The goal is the virtualization of program interfaces. That was accomplished here in a multistep automated process which led to small, environment independent COBOL modules which could be readily converted over into Java packages. The pilot project has been completed for a sample subset of the production planning and control system. The conversion to Java is pending the test of the reengineered COBOL modules.
... The migration strategy has been applied to a COBOL system which manages the college's halls and residences. Then Bodhuin et al. [9] have applied the migration strategy also to other three COBOL systems provided by two Italian companies. ...
... replacing conventional user interfaces with web pages[2,3]. ...
This paper describes a pilot project conducted to test the feasibility of constructing web services from existing mainframe
COBOL programs. The project involved the use of four tools. The first tool, COBAudit, was intended to identify candidates
for web services. The second tool, COBStrip, served to extract only that portion of the code required to fulfill the service.
The third tool, COBWrap, wrapped the code extracted from original code and converted it to an executable component. The fourth
tool, COBLink, connected the wrapped component to the web by generating a WSDL interface from either the COBOL linkage section
or the original map definition. The tools were applied to a legacy life insurance system with more than 20 million lines of
COBOL code running under IMS on the IBM mainframe.
... During the years, several approaches have been presented to migrate monolithic and procedural legacy systems to different distributed architectures, including client server architectures [10,12], distributed objects architectures [35,41], and web-based and service oriented architectures [2,3,7,13,30,42]. These approaches share some commonalities in the used reverse engineering and reengineering methods. ...
... These components are restructured and then turned into java classes by using the PERCobol tool [22]. The same authors in [7] present an approach and a tool to migrate a nondecomposable LEGACY SYSTEM to two-tier web-enabled architecture through the use of a Screen Proxy. This approach is very close to our approach. ...
... Research in the empirical software engineering field aims at acquiring general knowledge about which process, method, technique, language, or tool is useful for whom to conduct which tasks in which environments [4,21,38]. Concerning the migration of legacy systems, strategies and supporting tools have been largely experimented in case studies conducted on real size software systems [2,7,10,30,35,41]. On the other hand, controlled experiments have been rarely used in the software maintenance field. ...
We present two controlled experiments conducted with master students and practitioners and a case study conducted with practitioners to evaluate the use of MELIS (Migration Environment for Legacy Information Systems) for the migration of legacy COBOL programs to the web. MELIS has been developed as an Eclipse plug-in within a technology transfer project conducted with a small software company [16]. The partner company has developed and marketed in the last 30 years several COBOL systems that need to be migrated to the web, due to the increasing requests of the customers. The goal of the technology transfer project was to define a systematic migration strategy and the supporting tools to migrate these COBOL systems to the web and make the partner company an owner of the developed technology. The goal of the controlled experiments and case study was to evaluate the effectiveness of introducing MELIS in the partner company and compare it with traditional software development environments. The results of the overall experimentation show that the use of MELIS increases the productivity and reduces the gap between novice and expert software engineers.
... It also provides decision elements supporting the feasibility of the migration. Many of the strategies proposed to migrate legacy systems to the Web use white-box wrapping techniques and are conceived for decomposable or semi-decomposable software systems [6,21,22,41]. For example, Aversano et al. [6,21] propose integrating an existing COBOL system into a Web-enabled infrastructure. ...
... Rather than decomposing and restructuring the legacy system to wrap it at the application level, the low decomposability in our case required wrapping the legacy system at the presentation level and designing and developing a generic middleware component enabling the communication and synchronization of the Web user interface and the wrapped legacy code. The same authors [41] present an approach and a tool based on PERCobol to migrate non-decomposable legacy systems to a two-tier Web-enabled architecture. A screen proxy is introduced for handling the requests coming from or going to the user interface. ...
This paper presents the research results of an ongoing technology transfer project carried out in cooperation between the University of Salerno and a small software company. The project is aimed at developing and transferring migration technology to the industrial partner. The partner should be enabled to migrate monolithic multi-user COBOL legacy systems to a multi-tier Web-based architecture. The assessment of the legacy systems of the partner company revealed that these systems had a very low level of decomposability with spaghetti-like code and embedded control flow and database accesses within the user interface descriptions. For this reason, it was decided to adopt an incremental migration strategy based on the reengineering of the user interface using Web technology, on the transformation of interactive legacy programs into batch programs, and the wrapping of the legacy programs. A middleware framework links the new Web-based user interface with the Wrapped Legacy System. An Eclipse plug-in, named MELIS (migration environment for legacy information systems), was also developed to support the migration process. Both the migration strategy and the tool have been applied to two essential subsystems of the most business critical legacy system of the partner company. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
... These components are restructured and then turned into JAVA classes by using the PERCobol tool [21]. The same authors have presented in [9] an approach and a tool also based on PERCobol to migrate a non-decomposable LIS to two-tier web-enabled architecture. A Screen Proxy was introduced for the management of the requests coming from or going to the user interface. ...
To verify whether or not migration technologies can be adopted, systematic and quantitative evaluations should be performed. In this paper we present the results of a controlled experiment aimed at assessing the usefulness of an Eclipse plug-in, named MELIS (Migration Environment for Legacy Information Systems). This plug-in has been developed to support the migration of legacy information systems to a web-enabled multi-tier target architecture according with an incremental migration strategy. The context of the experiment was constituted of master students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno. The subjects without COBOL programming experience, while half of them had J2EE programming experience. The results of the experiment confirmed that the use of MELIS increases the productivity with respect to the use of traditional development tools.
Systems integration across organizational boundaries faces new challenges in semantic and syntactic interoperability. Legacy systems represent critical assets within organizations' enterprises that often encapsulate unique business functionality, along with organizational assumptions and perspectives. Exposing this functionality is essential for sharing business behavior across organizational boundaries, as are bridging semantic differences. In this paper, we use a noninvasive method to expose financial Web Services from a commercial legacy system by wrapping User Interfaces. We show that interoperability is affected by legacy structures exposed in the resulting service interface. We argue that syntactic service technology is not sufficient to overcome semantic conflicts caused by exposing legacy behavior to new user populations, and that semantic service descriptions are required to bridge the semantic gap.
We present an incremental approach to the migration of non decomposable COBOL applications to a web-enabled multi-tier architecture. The relevant software components of the target architecture, namely the communication middleware and the generator of graphical user interfaces, are developed once for all in order to reduce the migration effort. An Eclipse plugin has also been developed to support the software engineer in the migration of the graphical user interface and in the restructuring and wrapping of the original legacy code. A pilot project on a COBOL legacy system evolved during the last thirty years has been used to experiment the migration strategy and the plug-in.
We present the results of two controlled experiments aimed at assessing MELIS (migration environment for legacy information systems), a tool developed within a technology transfer project to support the migration of COBOL legacy information systems to a J2EE web-enabled multi-tier target architecture. The first controlled experiment was conducted within an academic research laboratory with master students in Computer Science at the University of Salerno, while a replicated experiment was conducted in the laboratory of our partner company with both professional programmers and academic researchers. The results revealed that the use of MELIS decrease the time to migrate legacy systems to the web with respect to the use of traditional development tools. Also, less expert software engineers benefit more of the use of MELIS.
