Persistent enterprise components: improving the availability of legacy systems

Abstract

Systems engineers are using object-oriented enterprise components to integrate and provide access to legacy information systems and databases. These components may extend the useful lifetime of a legacy system by making a subset of its data and functionality available to new applications, including intranets and extranets. However, the availability of the legacy systems often does not meet the requirements of these new applications. This paper presents a strategy for migration to enterprise components that improves the effective availability of legacy functionality and data by storing component data in native, object form. It proposes the use of persistence services embedded in the component execution environment to store persistent enterprise data. It compares the approach to alternatives and relates the initial experience in applying this strategy to command and control systems.