Enactment of Components Extracted from an Object-Oriented Application

Software architecture plays an important role for the application understanding before its maintenance. Unfortunately, for legacy systems code often there is no corresponding (or up to date) architecture. So, several work tackle this problem by extracting components from the legacy system and define their links. Although these components allow to get an architectural view of the legacy system, they still can’t be easily implemented in a concrete framework. In fact, restructuring completely the legacy system facilitates the mapping between the architectural elements and their corresponding ones in the code. This paves the way to the future maintenance of the system.

Our approach aims to reach this complete restructuring. Thus it goes beyond what exists in the state of the art by proposing a technique that makes components extracted from object-oriented applications implementable within a concrete component model. This is done by using class instances that compose the extracted components to infer possible instances the components. Thus, we propose for each extracted component its provided and required interfaces, and a way to construct its instances. We validated the feasibility of the proposed approach through the Spring framework and we illustrated it through a legacy Java application.