63. PROTEOMICS: A CASE STUDY OF MIGRATING AND INCORPORATING LEGACY SOFTWARE TOWARDS AN SOA-STRUCTURED SYSTEM

Department: Computer Science & Engineering
Faculty Advisor(s): Ingolf Krueger

Primary Student
Name: To-Ju Huang
Email: t3huang@ucsd.edu
Phone: 858-822-8700
Grad Year: 2010

Abstract
Although employing service-oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming a de facto practice in building large-scale distributed systems, an essential problem remains under-addressed: how to migrate and incorporate legacy software into an SOA-structured system. Preliminary investigation shows that the problem is actually twofold. First, to exercise the best practices of SOA, the concept of service should be employed to direct the entire software development process. Consequently extracting and consolidating reusable and composable services from legacy systems is recognized as a core step of an integration task. However, the knowledge about service extraction and refinement is still limited in both academia and industry. Second, chances are high that the overall system spans multiple authority domains, which require partial or whole business logic to be treated as black boxes. The disclosure prevents developers from applying technologies of service extraction and refinement, and in turn renders an optimal service restructuring unachievable. A service could end up splitting inappropriately based on domain boundaries.

In the project "Proteomics", a cyber-infrastructure is created for system integration and development, and contributions are made to this topic, shedding a light on solving both problems. First, the criteria of design decision, which is a cornerstone principle in software engineering, is used to analyze the system and find core services, which give us chance to consolidate them into reusable modules using state-of-the-art SOA-based technologies. Second, for black-box components, specification technologies are applied. With specifications, designers and engineers are able to model and manipulate latent services explicitly. The undertaking to coordinate different authority domains to fulfill a latent service is now shifted to the maintenance of the mapping between specifications and domain interfaces. The maintenance task is more approachable because it can be aided by a set of interactive GUI tools, and a well-defined set of specifications we developed can serve as a good starting point for creating such tools.

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