A Strategy and an Eclipse Based Environment for the Migration of Legacy Systems to Multi-tier Web-based Architectures

Abstract

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 plug-in 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