Migrating COBOL systems to the Web by using the MVC design pattern

Abstract

Integrating legacy Cobol systems into a Web-based architecture is a complex and challenging task. Cobol is not a distributed and object-oriented language, however its integration with other languages or distributed systems is a prerequisite for achieving migration towards Web technologies. Moreover, the user interface and user interaction modalities need to be changed. Numerous strategies have been proposed for wrapping the business logic and re-implementing the user interface, but there is still a great need for experimental research. This paper presents a migration strategy whose target system is a Web-enabled architecture based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern. By extracting all the needed information from the Cobol source code, the realized toolkit can automatically generate wrappers for the business logic and the data model and the Web user interface as Java server pages. The strategy and the toolkit presented have been defined within the project M&S SW, a research project aimed at defining new technological solutions to be transferred to small and medium enterprises operating in information and communication technologies.