Modernization of Legacy Web Applications into Rich Internet Applications

Abstract

In the last years one of the main concerns of the software industry has been to reengineer their legacy Web Applications (WAs) to take advantage of the benefits introduced by Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as enhanced user interaction and network bandwith optimization. However, those reengineering processes have been traditionally performed in an ad-hoc manner, resulting in very expensive and error-prone projects. This situation is partly motivated by the fact that most of the legacy WAs were developed before Model-Driven Development (MDD) approaches became mainstream. Then maintenance activities of those legacy WAs have not been yet incorporated to a MDA development lifecycle. OMG Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) advocates for applying MDD principles to formalize and standardize those reengineering processes with modernization purposes. In this paper we outline an ADM-based WA-to-RIA modernization process, highlighting the special characteristics of this modernization scenario.