Many business Web-based applications do not offer APIs to enable other applications to access their data and functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult for instance to synchronize data between two applications. To address this challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the integration of such legacy Web applications by automatically imitating human interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the GUI of Web applications, the system supports all forms of integrations including bidirectional interactions and is able to interact with AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to write because they deal with end-user, visual UI elements. The integration code is simple enough to be called a 'mash-up'. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
There's a difference between what we'd like our enterprise computing systems to be and what they really are. We like to envision them as orderly multitier arrangements comprising software buses, hubs, gateways, and adapters - all deployed at just the right places to maximize scale, load, application utility, and ultimately, business value. Unfortunately, we know that there's a wide gulf between this idealistic vision and reality. In practice, our enterprise computing systems typically are tangles of numerous technologies, protocols, and applications, often hastily hard-wired together with inflexible point-to-point connections. The whole point of middleware is to hide the diversity and complexity of the computing machinery underneath it. By adopting the abstractions that middleware provides, we're supposedly isolating our applications from the variety of ever-changing hardware platforms, operating systems, networks, protocols, and transports that make up our enterprise computing systems. We can use Web services to provide "middleware for middleware" abstraction layer for modern integration applications. A common task in many database applications is the migration of legacy data from multiple sources into a new one. This requires identifying semantically related elements of the source and target systems and the creation of mapping expressions to transform instances of those elements from the source format to the target format. Currently, data migration is typically done manually, a tedious and timeconsuming process, which is difficult to scale to a high number of data sources. In this paper, we describe QuickMig, a new semi-automatic approach to determining semantic correspondences between schema elements for data migration applications. QuickMig advances the state of the art with a set of new techniques exploiting sample instances, domain ontologies, and reuse of existing mappings to detect not only element correspondences but also their mapping expressions. QuickMig further includes new mechanisms to effectively incorporate domain knowledge of users into the matching process. The results from a comprehensive evaluation using real-world schemas and data indicate the high quality and practicability of the overall approach. Legacy programs, i. e. programs which have been developed with an outdated technology make-up for the vast majority of programs in many user application environments. It is these programs which actually run the information systems of the business world. Moving to a new technology such as service oriented architecture is impossible without taking these programs along. This contribution presents a tool supported method for achieving that goal. Legacy code is wrapped behind an XML shell which allows individual functions within the programs, to be offered as Web services to any external user. By means of this wrapping technology, a significant part of the company software assets can be preserved within the framework of a service oriented architecture. An important prerequisite to connecting existing systems to the Web is the ability to link client programs on the Web site with server programs on the host. The host programs have not been conceived to run in an internet mode. They are either online transactions or batch steps. This paper describes a tool supported process to cut out selected sections of legacy code and to provide them with an XML interface. The same interface is used to generate a Java class, which creates XML messages returning from the server. This class is then built in to the package managing the Web site. In this way a consistent communication between the Web site and the server components on the host is ensured. Migration of form based legacy systems towards service-oriented computing is a challenging task, requiring the adaptation of the legacy interface to the interaction paradigm of Web services. In this paper, a wrapping methodology is proposed to make interactive functionalities of legacy systems accessible as Web services. The wrapper that is used for interacting with the legacy system acts as an interpreter of a finite state automaton that describes the model of the interaction between user and legacy system. This model is obtained by black box reverse engineering techniques. A migration process and a software architecture that allow a functionality of a legacy system to be exported as a Web service are presented in the paper.