A Study On Gui Based Web Service Migration Techniques

During the modernization of legacy systems, basic modules of legacy systems are usually encapsulated. Sometimes the source codes of legacy systems need to be redeveloped. These white-box methods not only need thorough study of implementation details of legacy systems, but also require exposure of legacy interfaces or even source codes.In this paper, a migration framework of legacy systems is designed and implemented in a distributed system based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), in which a scripted black-box strategy is employed to integrate the GUI based legacy systems into our distributed environment. The GUI operations of a legacy system are recorded in a script written in Lua or Python, and then wrapped as a GUI-operation Web service. Moreover, the Virtual Network Computing (VNC) tool is wrapped into the remote-control Web service with virtual machine techniques in order to invoke legacy systems remotely.These Web services can be orchestrated as a BPEL (Business Process Execute Language) process, which is executed to invoke corresponding functions of these legacy systems. Practical applications have demonstrated that this framework can be applied to most GUI based legacy systems.