A methodology for refactoring ORM-based monolithic web applications into microservices

Abstract

In the last few years we have been seeing a drastic change in the way software is developed. Large-scale software projects are being assembled by a flexible composition of many (small) components possibly written in different programming languages and deployed anywhere in the cloud — the so-called microservices-based applications. The dramatic growth in popularity of microservices-based applications has pushed several companies to apply major refactorings to their software systems. However, this is a challenging task that may take several months or even years. We propose a methodology to automatically evolve monolithic web applications that use object-relational mapping into microservices-based ones. Our methodology receives the source code and a microservices proposal and refactors the original code to create each microservice. Our methodology creates an API for each method call to classes that are in other services. The database entities are also refactored to be included in the corresponding service. The evaluation performed in 120 applications shows that our tool can successfully refactor about 72% of them. The execution of the unit tests in both versions of the applications yield exactly the same results.