What is Legacy Integration

Maintaining and upgrading legacy systems is one of the challenges many enterprises face today. Despite their obsolescence, legacy systems continue to provide a competitive advantage by supporting unique business processes and acting as a repository for invaluable knowledge and historical data. However, enterprises would prefer to develop their applications with modern software technology instead of continuing to develop in the mainframe but leverage existing business processes and data from their legacy systems. This chapter presents an architectural framework and implementation methodology of a Central Intelligent Agent that is responsible for legacy integration. The framework uses an Enterprise Service Bus for service integration and agents to handle services. The Central Intelligent Agent uses a Prolog-style rule-based engine and context awareness for service handling and a complementary service agent on the mainframe side for legacy integration. The underlying framework provides a full set of functions to integrate legacy COBOL applications as services into the system without any programming effort in COBOL. The proposed technique enables fast prototyping and rapid development in an agile development process. It also facilitates legacy migration through successive and iterative processes.