Rule-based detection for reverse engineering user interfaces

Reengineering the user interface can be a critical part of the migration of any large information system. The paper details experiences with manually reverse engineering legacy applications to build a model of the user interface functionality, and to develop a technique for partially automating this process. The results show that a language-independent set of rules can be used to detect user interface components from legacy code, and also illustrate problems that require dynamic analysis to solve them.