Enabling legacy system accessibility by Web heterogeneous clients

Abstract

In the Internet era, a challenging issue consists of defining viable solutions for integrating existing enterprise systems and making them accessible from heterogeneous client devices by exploiting the common infrastructure offered by the Web. This paper presents an integration approach that exploits black-box techniques for capturing the dynamic and static models of a legacy system user interface, and reproducing them on client devices with the support of a software wrapper. The wrapper is designed to satisfy service stability, data integration, and application integration requirements, and exploits State Chart Diagrams and open standard technologies, such as XML and XSL. In the paper, a methodology for designing the wrapper is proposed, and a toolkit that supports the application of the methodology is presented. An example of using the methodology for wrapping an existing system and exporting it to a Web browser and a WAP mobile phone is, finally, discussed.