A Comparative Study of using Object Oriented Approach and Aspect Oriented Approach for the Evolution of Legacy System

Legacy systems are vital to an organization, and sometimes form the backbone of an organization, yet their maintenance and evolution had been an area of research for a long time. Besides being costly to maintain, legacy systems often lag behind changes in the businesses they support. The challenge in today’s environment is to keep evolving the older systems so that they are compatible with the real world technological environment. The most common approach was to migrate the legacy code to object oriented code. However, there are many other paradigms that a legacy system might adopt. Aspect-oriented technology is another emerging programming paradigm that is receiving considerable attention from research and practitioner communities alike. Nowadays much of the work is carried on, on developing different methodologies to enable aspect oriented programming to be applied to legacy systems. In this paper, we begin by highlighting the work done in evolving a legacy system using the object oriented approach, then we analyze the impact of object oriented technology and aspect oriented technology on legacy systems and the environment that is required to implement the two paradigms. The advantages and disadvantages of both the paradigms have been explored, and a comparative study of both the paradigms is done and analyzed in the light of legacy systems.