Transformation of Legacy Software into Client/Server Applications through Pattern-Based Rearchitecturing

In this article, we address the problem of modularizing legacy applications with monolithic structure, primarily focusing on business software written in an object-oriented programming language. We introduce theTransFormr toolkit that guides the developer through the entire incremental transformation process. It is the goal of the transformation to separate the original software into several independent replaceable components to support the migration of legacy code to new hardware or to integrate legacy components into modern enterprise applications. We show the effectiveness of our approach by demonstrating a pattern-based transformation of classes in a case study.