Developing a Model-Driven Reengineering Approach for Migrating PL/SQL Triggers to Java: A Practical Experience

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical, model-driven reengineering approach for migrating legacy PL/SQL triggers to Java, including a detailed process, tool development, and validation, to facilitate system evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model-driven reengineering process and tool for migrating PL/SQL code to Java, integrating TDD-like development and validation techniques.

Findings

Successful migration of PL/SQL triggers to Java using the proposed approach

Validation techniques improve the quality of generated code

The process supports incremental development and validation

Abstract

Model-driven software engineering (MDE) techniques are not only useful in forward engineering scenarios, but can also be successfully applied to evolve existing systems. RAD (Rapid Application Development) platforms emerged in the nineties, but the success of modern software technologies motivated that a large number of enterprises tackled the migration of their RAD applications, such as Oracle Forms. Our research group has collaborated with a software company in developing a solution to migrate PL/SQL monolithic code on Forms triggers and program units to Java code separated in several tiers. Our research focused on the model-driven reengineering process applied to develop the migration tool for the conversion of PL/SQL code to Java. Legacy code is represented in form of KDM (Knowledge-Discovery Metamodel) models. In this paper, we propose a software process to implement a model-driven re-engineering. This process integrates a TDD-like approach to incrementally develop model transformations with three kinds of validations for the generated code. The implementation and validation of the re-engineering approach are explained in detail, as well as the evaluation of some issues related with the application of MDE.