Solutions for Reverse Engineering 4GL Applications, Recovering the Design of a Logistical Wholesale System

Abstract

Re-engineering a legacy software system to support new, modern technologies instead of old ones is not an easy task, especially for large systems with a complex architecture. The use of reverse engineering tools is crucial for different subtasks of the full process, such as re-documenting the old code or recovering its design. There are many tools available to assist developers, but most of these tools were designed to deal with third generation languages (e.g. Java, C, C++, C#). However, many large systems are developed in higher level languages (e.g. Magic, Informix, ABAP) and current tools are not able to support all the arising problems during re-engineering systems written in fourth generation languages. In this paper we present a project whose main goal is the development of a technologically and functionally renewed medicinal wholesale system. This system is developed in Magic 4GL, and its development is based on re-engineering an old Magic (version 5) system to uniPaaS, which is the current release version of Magic. In the early phases of this project we developed a reverse engineering toolset for Magic 4GL to support reverse engineering, recovering the design of the old system, and to support some forward engineering tasks too. Here we present a report on this project that was carried out in cooperation with SZEGED Software Zrt and the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged. The project was partly funded by the Economic Development Operational Programme, New Hungary Development Plan.

Feature Level Complexity and Coupling Analysis in 4GL Systems

“…The maintenance of Magic applications is supported by cost estimation and quality analysis methods [14,15,9]. Architectural analysis, reverse engineering and optimization are visible topics in the Magic community [16,17,3,2], and after some years of Magic development migration to object-oriented languages [18] as well.…”

“…Usual notions of size, complexity and coupling need to be re-interpreted in these cases. Building on previous works on metrics based quality assurance for 4GL [2,3] we take new direction to extend metrics towards product line architectures. Maintaining and releasing similar new products accumulates significant overhead over time.…”

Structural Information Aided Automated Test Method for Magic 4GL

“…The implementation of our method for Magic xpa is based on several existing tools. First of all, we use a reverse engineering tool set to access the source files of Magic xpa applications, which was implemented in a previous work of Nagy et al [17]. This toolset was able to analyze magic programs and produce the ASG.…”

“…The process starts with the application of the Magic2ASG tool [17] on the source files of the program under test. This tool extracts important information about the actual application by examining its XML based source code.…”

Evaluating optimization and reverse engineering techniques on data-intensive systems

“…We should add here, that most of the presented approaches had a real industrial motivation, allowing us to validate our methods in 'in vivo', industrial environment. Innovation projects sponsored by the European Union also rely on the results of our work [129,132]. In addition, the reverse engineering framework for Magic motivated research studies for the National Scientific Students' Associations Conference.…”