Extracting Reusable Object-Oriented Legacy Code Segments with Combined Formal Concept Analysis and Slicing Techniques for Service Integration

Abstract

Web services, together with service-oriented architectures, are promising integration technology to facilitate legacy system Webification and evolution. However, a service-oriented re-engineering process is still essential for legacy systems to survive in the service-oriented computing environment. In this service-oriented re-engineering process, understanding and reusing object-oriented code turn to be important activities. In this paper, we proposed a comprehensive approach to support the extraction and integration of reusable object-oriented legacy code. In the extraction phase, formal concept analysis, which is a general and flexible technique for recovering structural design information, and inter-procedural program slicing are adopted as main reverse engineering techniques to recover reusable object-oriented code. In the integration phase, service packaging processes are presented in details. Our approach produces extracted components with core legacy object-oriented code function in Web services by wrapping underlying computing models with XML