A lightweight approach for migrating web frameworks

Abstract

Web application development frameworks, like the Java Server Pages framework (JSP), provide web applications with essential functions such as maintaining state information across the application and access control. In the fast paced world of web applications, new frameworks are introduced and old ones are updated frequently. A framework is chosen during the initial phases of the project. Hence, changing it to match the new requirements and demands is a cumbersome task. We propose an approach (based on Water Transformations) to migrate web applications between various web development frameworks. This migration process preserves the structure of the code and the location of comments to facilitate future manual maintenance of the migrated code. Consequently, developers can move their applications to the framework that meets their current needs instead of being locked into their initial development framework. We give an example of using our approach to migrate a web application written using the Active Server Pages (ASP) framework to the Netscape Server Pages (NSP) framework.