Re-Engineering a Reverse Engineering Portal to a Distributed SOA

REportal is an existing Web-based reverse engineering portal Web site that provides access to a suite of reverse engineering and program comprehension tools via a Web browser. This abstraction was intended to allow ease of system maintenance by adding and upgrading tools without involving the end user. However, the software tools and server technologies used became deprecated so quickly that it was not possible to take full advantage of the architectural vision. Using a service-oriented architecture, we abstract the process flow of the system from the underlying tools, enabling a wizard-style method of adding services to the system, and facilitating more "hands-off" maintenance. In this paper, we describe the challenges and benefits of this architectural migration.