Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 3, numbers 1 and 2, 2010 // View article

Modernization of a Legacy Application: Does it Have to be Hard?

Authors:
Arne Koschel
Carsten Kleiner
Irina Astrova

Keywords: service-oriented architecture; mainframe; legacy integration; experience report; Web service

Abstract:
Modernization of a legacy application is not very hard any more. Whereas this may have been true a couple of years ago, this paper describes a case study, which shows that the modernization is significantly easier if modern integration tools, a service-oriented architecture and Web services are used. This is by contrast to a common belief that the modernization is always hard, regardless of the technologies used. The case study, where bachelor students succeeded to carry out the modernization of a legacy application, shakes that belief. The students neither had previous experience with the technologies used in the legacy application nor with the ones used for the modernization. As major contributions this paper provides an overview of approaches to modernization, a full case study for the modernization (including details on business process analysis, architecture, and tools), and comprehensive ‘lessons learned’ to help for ‘the practice’.

Pages: 213 to 224

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 5, 2010

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628