Authors:
Christoph Gaudl
1
and
Philipp Brune
1
;
2
Affiliations:
1
SQ Solutions GmbH, Platz der Einheit 2, 60327 Frankfurt / Main, Germany
;
2
Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences, Wileystraße 1, 89231 Neu-Ulm, Germany
Keyword(s):
Legacy Application Modernization, Microservices, Web Services, REST, Java, COBOL.
Abstract:
Many aspects of modern life still depend on large-scale, monolithic legacy applications, e.g. in financial services, transport or public administration. Typically, these applications are written in ancient programming languages such as COBOL and use proprietary transaction processing monitors like CICS. While the modernization or replacement of these legacy application has been discusses in literature and practice for decades, still no universal solution exists. In many cases, an evolutionary modernization strategy has shown to be successful in practice, allowing to modernize the software architecture as well, not only the program code. Therefore, in this paper an analysis pattern is derived for transforming stateful, transactional COBOL programs into stateless RESTful web services. This pattern is evaluated by analyzing and transforming an example COBOL application to Java. While the approach shows to be useful in case of the example application, it needs to be further investigated
in a broader range of real-world scenarios.
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