A distributed object computing architecture for software reengineering

Abstract

Existing commercial tools for software reengineering are mostly designed for centralized environments. These tools for reengineering legacy systems are usually inflexible and nonscalable. With the advent and widespread use of object-oriented and client-server technologies, customers are expecting their software reengineering tools developed for the centralized environment to take advantage of these new technologies and also cooperate with their heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we propose a distributed object computing architecture for allowing existing commercial centralized software reengineering products to integrate with the customer's heterogeneous systems. The proposed architecture was implemented using CORBA technology. The architecture serves three purposes: 1) preserving the software vendor's existing products without rewriting or converting them, 2) keeping the customer's tools operational without delaying the reengineering schedule and 3) making the software vendor's products to integrate with the customer's heterogeneous environments.