Distributed Objects and Software Application Wrappers: A Vehicle for Software Re-engineering

Abstract

It is always difficult to ensure the success of a re-engineering project. It takes careful planning to set the objectives and pursue realistic solutions that can be both technically feasible, and have a high benefit to investment ratio. A fundamental requirement for software re-engineering is to ?understand? what and how the existing system delivers its functionality. These tasks can be addressed by re-documentation and design recovery techniques. However, it is not always necessary to re-engineer a system from ground up, and by understanding all of its implementation details. It is a common a scenario in industry, to move towards a software evolutionary pattern in which a legacy system need to be migrated and used in a new operating environment, or be integrated as a component of a new application. Some refer to this pattern as continuous engineering. The requirement in which a re-engineering project is based on the re-use of existing host applications and data with minimal rewriting is too common to be ignored. Within this framework, architectural design recovery of a system, with respect to its major components and its major interfaces, offers a gateway to making legacy system components available to other applications. Distributed Object Technology hides implementation details of these components and provides a vehicle that exposes public interfaces for the legacy system.