Challenges and Issues to Consider When Upgrading Legacy Applications

Abstract

This chapter will focus on the challenges and issues an organization faces when trying to integrate or migrate their legacy applications with more advanced client/server information systems. These applications present a challenge when an organization attempts to integrate its legacy applications with newer technologies due to the rigid binding of the client to the legacy application server. FAIME, is an object oriented methodology that provides the tools to address application interoperation and plug-and-play. These tools open closed legacy applications through legacy applications decomposition and produce executable objects that bridge different operating systems, communication infrastructures, and databases. To convert a COBOL legacy application to an object-oriented application, a complete restructuring of the legacy program is needed. Objects and their inheritance structure must be identified, data usage and data flow must be analyzed, and instructions must be allocated to objects. Dynamic Object Oriented Programming allows parts of an application design that are represented by objects, to be modified dynamically. Integrating or migrating legacy applications with newer more advanced client/server architectures can be a very expensive and time-consuming undertaking.