AtlanMod is a partner in the new european project ARTIST . To know what the project is about continue reading the following official press release
Turn your frumpy software into a more glamorous app?
Being stuck with ages-old software is a constant source of problems for businesses and companies. It is clunky, old fashioned, expensive to maintain and run, and never quite works anymore like it should. Now a team of experts from across Europe are working on providing a suitable answer to this issue…
The ARTIST project is a research project co-funded by the European Commission, under the FP7 Programme Objective “Cloud Computing, Internet of Services and advanced software engineering”. It proposes a software modernization approach using Model Driven Engineering techniques to automate the evolution and migration of legacy applications to and from platform-dependent models, allowing a cheap and rapid alternative to redeveloping applications by hand. It reduces the risk, time and cost of migrating legacy software and lowers the barriers for service companies wanting to take advantage of the latest Cloud Computing and SaaS-based technologies and business models.
Legacy applications watch by as their modern counterparts whizz through the internet, scaling up and down with demand and hosted from sleek and swanky datacenters. Not cut out for cloud computing they limp on, carrying out the same old menial tasks as ever, with less and less attention paid to updates and development. They know sooner or later they will be gone.
But now, the ARTIST project proposes a set of methods and tools which reverse-engineer legacy apps and then forward-engineer them to the desired platform. In doing so, the application can take advantage of the latest technology, such as cloud computing, smartphones and security features. Consequently, ARTIST‘s objective is to assess, plan, design, implement and validate the automated evolution of legacy software to SaaS and the Cloud Computing delivery model.
The European Commission is backing the team composed of specialists from industry and academia who are applying their experience in software development, Model Driven Engineering and cutting edge technologies like cloud computing to build a solution to modernize legacy applications. The project brings together two renowned universities (TUWIEN-Austria and ICCS/NTUA-Greece), three internationally recognized research institutes (TECNALIA-Spain, FRAUNHOFER IAO-Germany and INRIA-France) along with two powerful multinationals (ATOS-Spain and ENG-Italy) as well as three specialized SMEs (ATC-Greece, SPIKES-Belgium and SPARX-Austria).
Project coordinator, Clara Pezuela, from IT consultant Atos said:
“ARTIST is an exciting ground-breaking project applying the latest scientific achievements from multiple fields to an urgent and critical business problem faced by many European businesses. The project is committed to breaking down barriers to the cloud and revitalizing the thousands of legacy software applications sub-optimally in use today.”
It’s still early days, but the project has got off to a good start. If the solution works it will transform the way businesses view software and vitalize the SaaS market by reducing the risk, time and cost of migrating legacy software and lowering the barriers for service companies wanting to take advantage of the latest Cloud Computing and SaaS-based technologies and business models whilst balancing software continuity with optimal performance and cost.
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
Funny: did a project with this exact goal within Atos (NL) about 5 years ago – as a PoC for a customer even.
Conclusion: it’s doable but not without manually prepping the harvesting phase which is at least as hard as a line-by-line manual rewrite (because of “meta”) and only potentially less time-consuming.
The thing is that the essential complexity of the legacy software is buried quite circumspectly in the old code. Without a domain expert (or even non-misleading, fairly up-to-date documentation around) it is very hard to harvest that, along with all the small incidental details you do need (e.g., particular ways of communicating with another system and such) for the new, shiny version.
If you have a bunch of legacy software on the same platform which are fairly homogeneously programmed (or just one very large code base which is quite homogeneous), then it might soon become worthwhile.