Model-driven reverse engineering of legacy graphical user interfaces

Ramón, Óscar Sánchez; Cuadrado, Jesús Sánchez; Molina, José Jaime Capel

doi:10.1007/s10515-013-0130-2

Cited by 32 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Sánchez Ramán et al [13] and Garcés et al [4] developed approaches to extract the GUI of Oracle Forms applications. Their approaches consist in the creation of the hierarchy of widgets from their position specified in external files.…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

GUI Migration using MDE from GWT to Angular 6: An Industrial Case

Verhaeghe

Etien

Anquetil

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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During the evolution of an application, it happens that developers must change the programming language. In the context of a collaboration with Berger-Levrault, a major IT company, we are working on the migration of a GWT application to Angular. We focus on the GUI aspect of this migration which, even if both frameworks are web Graphical User Interface (GUI) frameworks, is made difficult because they use different programming languages and different organization schema. Such migration is complicated by the fact that the new application must be able to mimic closely the visual aspect of the old one so that the users of the application are not disrupted. We propose an approach in four steps that uses a meta-model to represent the GUI at a high abstraction level. We evaluated this approach on an application comprising 470 Java (GWT) classes representing 56 pages. We are able to model all the web pages of the application and 93% of the widgets they contain, and we successfully migrated 26 out of 39 pages (66%). We give examples of the migrated pages, both successful and not.

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Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…None of the authors considered the migration from web GUI to web GUI. Also, none had the constraint of keeping similar layout except Sánchez Ramán et al [13]; however, they worked on Oracle Forms applications which are very different from a web GUI. As a consequence, their work is not directly applicable to our case study.…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

GUI Migration using MDE from GWT to Angular 6: An Industrial Case

Verhaeghe

Etien

Anquetil

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

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“…Other particular examples of applications are automated design patterns detection using ontologies [36] or graphical interfaces separation and later reusability [37], which are also potentially adaptable in the context of MoDisco if some models can be exchanged between the solutions.…”

Section: Specific Reverse Engineering Solutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

MoDisco: A model driven reverse engineering framework

Brunelière¹,

Cabot²,

Dupé³

et al. 2014

Information and Software Technology

182

130

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Context: Most companies, independently of their size and activity type, are facing the problem of managing, maintaining and/or replacing (part of) their existing software systems. These legacy systems are often large applications playing a critical role in the company's information system and with a non-negligible impact on its daily operations. Improving their comprehension (e.g., architecture, features, enforced rules, handled data) is a key point when dealing with their evolution/modernization. Objective: The process of obtaining useful higher-level representations of (legacy) systems is called reverse engineering (RE), and remains a complex goal to achieve. Socalled Model Driven Reverse Engineering (MDRE) has been proposed to enhance more traditional RE processes. However, generic and extensible MDRE solutions potentially addressing several kinds of scenarios relying on different legacy technologies are still missing or incomplete. This paper proposes to make a step in this direction. Method: MDRE is the application of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) principles and techniques to RE in order to generate relevant model-based views on legacy systems, thus facilitating their understanding and manipulation. In this context, MDRE is practically used in order to 1) discover initial models from the legacy artifacts composing a given system and 2) understand (process) these models to generate relevant views (i.e., derived models) on this system. Results: Capitalizing on the different MDRE practices and our previous experience (e.g., in real modernization projects), this paper introduces and details the MoDisco open source MDRE framework. It also presents the underlying MDRE global methodology and architecture accompanying this proposed tooling. Conclusion: MoDisco is intended to make easier the design and building of modelbased solutions dedicated to legacy systems RE. As an empirical evidence of its relevance and usability, we report on its successful application in real industrial projects and on the concrete experience we gained from that.

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“…Migration has been a research topic for a long time. The scientific community has proposed many different ways of tackling down this problem [3,6,8,9,10,11,16,22]. Nevertheless, migration is hard, tightly related with its circumstances and therefore, still challenging and not completely solved [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most of the programming language compilers use plain text files as input for the programs they should compile or for configuration, such as XML, YML, properties, etc. Therefore, reengineering tools [12] often use the same approach for producing their internal models [6,8,11,13,16,21,22]. Work has already been done to mix static and dynamic analysis 3 [7,15,18,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysing Microsoft Access Projects: Building a Model in a Partially Observable Domain

Bragagnolo

Anquetil

Ducasse

et al. 2020

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Due to the technology evolution, every IT Company migrates their software systems at least once. Reengineering tools build system models which are used for running software analysis. These models are traditionally built from source code analysis and information accessible by data extractors (that we call such information observable). In this article we present the case of Microsoft Access projects and how this kind of project is partially observable due to proprietary storing formats. We propose a novel approach for building models that allows us to overcome this problem by reverse engineering the development environment runtime through the usage of Microsoft COM interface. We validate our approach and implementation by fully replicating 10 projects, 8 of them industrial, based only on our model information. We measure the replication performance by measuring the errors during the process and completeness of the product. We measure the replication error, by tracking replication operations. We used the scope and completeness measure to enact this error. Completeness is measured by the instrumentation of a simple and scoped diff based on a third source of information. We present extensive results and interpretations. We discuss the threats to validity, the possibility of other approaches and the technological restrictions of our solution.

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Model-driven reverse engineering of legacy graphical user interfaces

Cited by 32 publications

References 13 publications

GUI Migration using MDE from GWT to Angular 6: An Industrial Case

GUI Migration using MDE from GWT to Angular 6: An Industrial Case

MoDisco: A model driven reverse engineering framework

Analysing Microsoft Access Projects: Building a Model in a Partially Observable Domain

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