Reverse Engineering of Event Handlers of RAD-Based Applications

Businesses are more and more modernising the legacy systems they developed with Rapid Application Development (RAD) environments, so that they can benefit from the new platforms and technologies. When facing the modernisation of applications developed with RAD environments, developers must deal with event handling code that typically mixes concerns such as GUI and business logic. In this paper we propose a model-based approach to tackle the reverse engineering of event handlers in RAD-based applications. Event handling code is transformed into an intermediate representation that captures the high-level behaviour of the code. From this representation, some modernisation tasks can be automated, and we propose the migration to a different architecture as an example. In particular, from PL/SQL code, a new Ajax application will be generated, where business logic, user interface and control code have been separated.