Reengineering and Wrapping Legacy Modules for Reuse as Web Services: Motivation, Method, Tools, and Case Studies

Introduction

There are many reasons for users to want to migrate to a service-oriented architecture. There are both business and technical reasons. The business reasons are among others:

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  To become faster and more flexible in responding to user requirements,

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  To give the users a wide range selection of ready-made services,

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  To unify common business functionality,

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  To cut the costs of maintaining an oversized software base.

In short, the business goal is to provide more business functionality in shorter time with fewer costs.

The technical reasons for migrating are among other:

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  To reduce the complexity of the existing IT-landscape,

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  To eliminate the many redundancies associated with a silo-type software architecture,

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  To reduce the amount of software which has to be maintained,

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  To unify the diverse software solutions in a common architectural mode.

In short, the technical goal is to simplify and unify the user’s software base, thus reducing the costs of maintaining it.