Interactive, Iterative, Tooled, Rule-Based Migration of Microsoft Access to Web Technologies

TL;DR

This paper presents an interactive, iterative, rule-based migration approach enabling developers to migrate Microsoft Access applications to web technologies, supporting learning and future evolution of the migrated system.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interactive migration process, supporting developers in migrating Access applications to web and microservices architectures with supporting artefacts.

Findings

Successful migration of libraries and paradigms to Java and Pharo

Migration of tables and queries to Java and Typescript

Form migration to Java Springboot and Typescript Angular

Abstract

In the context of a collaboration with Berger-Levrault, an IT company producing information systems, we are working on migrating Microsoft Access monolithic applications to the web front-end and microservices back-end. Like in most software migrations, developers must learn the target technology, and they will be in charge of the evolution of the migrated system in the future. To respond to this problem, we propose the developers take over the migration project. To enable the developers to drive the migration to the target systems, we propose an Interactive, Iterative, Tooled, Rule-Based Migration approach. The contributions of this article are (i) an iterative, interactive process to language, library, GUI and architectural migration; (ii) proposal of a set of artefacts required to support such an approach; (iii) three different validations of the approach: (a) library and paradigm usage migration to Java and Pharo, (b) tables and queries migration to Java and Typescript, (c) form migration to Java Springboot and Typescript Angular.