Towards a Pattern-based Approach for Transforming Legacy COBOL Applications Into RESTful Web Services

Christoph Gaudl, Philipp Brune, Philipp Brune

2022

Abstract

Many aspects of modern life still depend on large-scale, monolithic legacy applications, e.g. in financial services, transport or public administration. Typically, these applications are written in ancient programming languages such as COBOL and use proprietary transaction processing monitors like CICS. While the modernization or replacement of these legacy application has been discusses in literature and practice for decades, still no universal solution exists. In many cases, an evolutionary modernization strategy has shown to be successful in practice, allowing to modernize the software architecture as well, not only the program code. Therefore, in this paper an analysis pattern is derived for transforming stateful, transactional COBOL programs into stateless RESTful web services. This pattern is evaluated by analyzing and transforming an example COBOL application to Java. While the approach shows to be useful in case of the example application, it needs to be further investigated in a broader range of real-world scenarios.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Gaudl C. and Brune P. (2022). Towards a Pattern-based Approach for Transforming Legacy COBOL Applications Into RESTful Web Services. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-613-2, pages 159-165. DOI: 10.5220/0011575300003318

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist22,
author={Christoph Gaudl and Philipp Brune},
title={Towards a Pattern-based Approach for Transforming Legacy COBOL Applications Into RESTful Web Services},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2022},
pages={159-165},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011575300003318},
isbn={978-989-758-613-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - Towards a Pattern-based Approach for Transforming Legacy COBOL Applications Into RESTful Web Services
SN - 978-989-758-613-2
AU - Gaudl C.
AU - Brune P.
PY - 2022
SP - 159
EP - 165
DO - 10.5220/0011575300003318