MineITTM Object Mining Solution

A high percentage of legacy application contents are business rules that are "wrapped" and incorporated today in obsolescent legacy technology. As these business rules compose the very core of the organization's knowledge and competitiveness, their logic should be kept intact and reused in a new technological application environment, once they are identified and extracted. Intercomp's reengineering tools are designed for that purpose, providing customers with a variety of graphical and repository-based analysis and reengineering tools for discovering, then extracting business rules and creating objects from legacy applications by moving them into state-of-the-art Java objects and Enterprise Java Beans. The resulting Java code is significantly smaller and purely object-oriented.

The Reengineering Process

Legacy code, by design, intertwines the presentation layer with the business logic layer. With Intercomp's compiler-centric technology base, a legacy application can be pulled apart into three separate pieces: data, user interface and application logic (business rules). This approach allows a gradual migration strategy.

The reengineering process begins with an analysis of the legacy application, usually carried out with Intercomp's assessment tool, AnalyzeITTM The analysis process maps the application architecture flow, showing connections between the various components of the application, and creating a repository and an inventory. This representation enables the user to view the actual source of each of the legacy components and begin the business rule mining process.

When rewriting the new application with the aid of Intercomp's eMakerTM product line, emphasis is put on the extraction of the business rules and the construction of objects with the MineITTM tool. This extraction is done by tracing the Business rules' "hooks" (i.e., variables, data items, records, file definitions, CICS transactions, etc.) throughout the entire application. Once the business rule identification has been completed, MineITTM will convert the business rule into a Java object or an Enterprise Java Bean. After all business rules have been identified, the user can choose whether to reuse them in a skeleton that is written from scratch, or to convert automatically the legacy application to Java, using the eMakerTM solution and the business rules instead of the original legacy source code.