Injecting software architectural constraints into legacy scientific applications

Abstract

While software architectures have been shown to aid developers in maintenance, reuse, and evolution as well as many other software engineering tasks, there is little language-level support for these architectural concepts in legacy programming languages such as Fortran and C. Because many existing scientific codes are written in legacy programming languages, it is difficult to integrate them into architected software systems. By wrapping these scientific codes in architecturally-aware Java interfaces, we are able to componentize legacy programs, integrating them into systems built with first-class architectural elements while meeting the performance and throughput requirements of scientific codes.

The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-Off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review

“…Paper [26] is a long-term analysis of a scientific software with a focus on its maintainability. Paper [27] deals with maintainability and performance. They wrap existing legacy-codes in architectureaware interfaces to embed them into architectured software systems.…”

“…Only one paper was published as a technical report and, hence, definitely non-refereed. [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [27], [40], [30], [41], [31], [43], [32], [44] Empirical study without intervention 11 [18], [22], [24], [26], [15], [29], [19], [42], [20], [17], [21] Empirical study with intervention 5 [23], [38], [39], [25], [28] Opinion/philosophical paper 4 [13], [14], [2], [16] We also classified the included article in different types. We show the results in Tab.…”

“…Furthermore, we identified four different classes of contributions in the included articles as shown in Table IV. [18], [26], [16], [29], [19], [17], [21] Describe/analyze trade-off 5 [13], [22], [24], [2], [20] Solutions for single attributes 8 [33], [14], [23], [25], [15], [28], [30], [32] Solutions for trade-off 13 [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [27], [40], [41], [31], [42], [43], [44] The papers describing or analyzing single attributes concentrate on one or more of the quality attributes. We have seven such papers.…”

Bridging the Chasm

“…They demonstrated a proof concept by augmenting an existing application with check points implemented as higher level abstraction aspects. Woollard et al [2009] addresses a similar problem by demonstrating a technique for encapsulating legacy scientific codes within a component oriented framework. Woollard et al [2009] argues that this approach, involving only a limited amount of alteration to the legacy codes themselves, eases the process of architectural maintenance as system requirements evolve.…”

“…Woollard et al [2009] addresses a similar problem by demonstrating a technique for encapsulating legacy scientific codes within a component oriented framework. Woollard et al [2009] argues that this approach, involving only a limited amount of alteration to the legacy codes themselves, eases the process of architectural maintenance as system requirements evolve. Overbey et al [2009] investigated an alternative technique for refactoring legacy Fortran programs to remove deprecated program constructs with alternatives (replacing goto statements with if constructs, for example).…”