Leveraging legacy codes to distributed problem solving environments: A web service approach

This paper describes techniques used to leverage high performance legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem solving environment. It first briefly introduces the software architecture adopted by the environment. Then it presents a CORBA oriented wrapper generator (COWG) which can be used to automatically wrap high performance legacy codes as CORBA components. Two legacy codes have been wrapped with COWG. One is an MPI-based molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) code, the other is a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows. Performance comparisons between runs of the MDS CORBA component and the original MDS legacy code on a cluster of workstations and on a parallel computer are also presented. Wrapped as CORBA components, these legacy codes can be reused in a distributed computing environment. The first case shows that high performance can be maintained with the wrapped MDS component. The second case shows that a Web user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user’s desktop computing environment can be extended to a high performance computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer

COBOL systems migration to SOA: Assessing antipatterns and complexity

SOA and Web Services allow users to easily expose business functions to build larger distributed systems. However, legacy systems - mostly in COBOL - are left aside unless applying a migration approach. The main approaches are direct and indirect migration. The former implies wrapping COBOL programs with a thin layer of a Web Service oriented language/platform. The latter needs reengineering COBOL functions to a modern language/ platform. In our previous work, we presented an intermediate approach based on direct migration where developed Web Services are later refactored to improve the quality of their interfaces. Refactorings mainly capture good practices inherent to indirect migration. For this, antipatterns for WSDL documents (common bad practices) are detected to prevent issues related to WSDLs understanding and discoverability. In this paper, we assess antipatterns of Web Services’ WSDL documents generated upon the three migration approaches. In addition, generated Web Services’ interfaces are measured in complexity to attend both comprehension and interoperability. We apply a metric suite (by Baski & Misra) to measure complexity on services interfaces - i.e., WSDL documents. Migrations of two real COBOL systems upon the three approaches were assessed on antipatterns evidences and the complexity level of the generated SOA frontiers - a total of 431 WSDL documents.Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Andrés Pablo. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informática. Departamento Ingeniería de Sistemas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte; ArgentinaFil: Misra, Sanjay. Atilim University; Turquía. Covenant University; Nigeri

Modernizing Legacy Physics Applications for Reuse in Web and SOA

This paper concerns the application of recent information technologies for creating a software system for numerical simulations in the domain of plasma physics and in particular metal vapor lasers. The presented work is connected with performing modernization of legacy physics software for reuse on the web and inside a Service-Oriented Architecture environment. Applied and described is the creation of Java front-ends of legacy C++ and FORTRAN codes. Then the transformation of some of the scientific components into web services, as well as the creation of a web interface to the legacy application, is presented. The use of the BPEL language for managing scientific workflows is also considered.* This work was partially supported by the NSF of the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science, project VU-MI-205/2006, and the RS-2009-M13 project of the Scientific Fund of the Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Developing Legacy System Migration Methods and Tools for Technology Transfer

This paper presents the research results of an ongoing technology transfer project carried out in coopera- tion 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 decompos- ability 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

Prototyping the recursive internet architecture: the IRATI project approach

In recent years, many new Internet architectures are being proposed to solve shortcomings in the current Internet. A lot of these new architectures merely extend the current TCP/IP architecture and hence do not solve the fundamental cause of these problems. The Recursive Internet Architecture (RINA) is a true new network architecture, developed from scratch, building on lessons learned in the past. RINA prototyping efforts have been ongoing since 2010, but a prototype on which a commercial RINA implementation can be built has not been developed yet. The goal of the IRATI research project is to develop and evaluate such a prototype in Linux/OS. This article focuses on the software design required to implement a network stack in Linux/OS. We motivate the placement of, and communication between, the different software components in either the kernel or user space. The first open source prototype of the IRATI implementation of RINA will be available in June 2014 for researchers, developers, and early adopters

Business rules based legacy system evolution towards service-oriented architecture.

Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile and real-time. Service orientation is emerging from the amalgamation of a number of key business, technology and cultural developments. Three essential trends in particular are coming together to create a new revolutionary breed of enterprise, the service-oriented enterprise (SOE): (1) the continuous performance management of the enterprise; (2) the emergence of business process management; and (3) advances in the standards-based service-oriented infrastructures. This thesis focuses on this emerging three-layered architecture that builds on a service-oriented architecture framework, with a process layer that brings technology and business together, and a corporate performance layer that continually monitors and improves the performance indicators of global enterprises provides a novel framework for the business context in which to apply the important technical idea of service orientation and moves it from being an interesting tool for engineers to a vehicle for business managers to fundamentally improve their businesses

Experiences In Migrating An Industrial Application To Aspects

Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) is a paradigm aiming to solve problems of object-oriented programming (OOP). With normal OOP it’s often unlikely to accomplish fine system modularity due to crosscutting concerns being scattered and tangled throughout the system. AOSD resolves this problem by its capability to crosscut the regular code and as a consequence transfer the crosscutting concerns to a single model called aspect. This thesis describes an experiment on industrial application wherein the effectiveness of aspect-oriented techniques is explained in migration the OOP application into aspects. The experiment goals at first to identify the crosscutting concerns in source code of the industrial application and transform these concerns to a functionally equivalent aspect-oriented version. In addition to presenting experiences gained through the experiment, the thesis aims to provide practical guidance of aspect solutions in a real application

Component-based software engineering

To solve the problems coming with the current software development methodologies, component-based software engineering has caught many researchers\u27 attention recently. In component-based software engineering, a software system is considered as a set of software components assembled together instead of as a set of functions from the traditional perspective. Software components can be bought from third party vendors as off-the-shelf components and be assembled together. Component-based software engineering, though very promising, needs to solve several core issues before it becomes a mature software development strategy. The goal of this dissertation is to establish an infrastructure for component-based software development. The author identifies and studies some of the core issues such as component planning, component building, component assembling, component representation, and component retrieval. A software development process model is developed in this dissertation to emphasize the reuse of existing software components. The software development process model addresses how a software system should be planned and built to maximize the reuse of software components. It conducts domain engineering and application engineering simultaneously to map a software system to a set of existing components in such a way that the development of a software system can reuse the existing software components to the full extent. Besides the planning of software development based on component technology, the migration and integration of legacy systems, most of which are non-component-based systems, to the component-based software systems are studied. A framework and several methodologies are developed to serve as the guidelines of adopting component technology in legacy systems. Component retrieval is also studied in this dissertation. One of the most important issues in component-based software engineering is how to find a software component quickly and accurately in a component repository. A component representation framework is developed in this dissertation to represent software components. Based on the component representation framework, an efficient searching method that combines neural network, information retrieval, and Bayesian inference technology is developed. Finally a prototype component retrieval system is implemented to demonstrate the correctness and feasibility of the proposed method