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The migration of legacy systems to distributed, client/server architectures is a key problem of system re-engineering. Many systems to be re-engineered have been developed on mainframe systems. Customer pressure is for more responsive, distributed systems using PCs as clients and there are major technical challenges in supporting this migration.
A method and practical guidelines to evolve legacy systems towards evolutionary systems are needed to support the complex task of system evolution. These guidelines must cover several areas, ranging from business to technical considerations. Technical recommendations are necessary to support the selection of the target architecture and of enabling mechanisms, the definition of the steps to migrate towards this solution, and practical guidelines for the use of the selected mechanisms.
The objectives of this document are to give technical guidelines for the migration of legacy systems to distributed, client/server, architectures.
The recommendations given in this document provide guidance to a system architect looking for possible target architectures with a specific focus on reuse, integration, encapsulation and migration of existing system components or parts. Issues like the extension of a legacy system architecture and the integration of legacy system components are specifically addressed.
In addition to these conceptual recommendations,
a list of techniques and tools to build such evolutionary architectures
is presented. This list gives practical advice about the use of
these techniques to build such architectures and gives guidelines
to support their selection.