Codifying Hidden Dependencies in Legacy J2EE Applications

Codifying Hidden Dependencies in Legacy J2EE Applications. Hecht, G., Mili, H., El Boussaidi, G., Boubaker, A., Abdellatif, M., Gu�h�neuc, Y., Shatnawi, A., Privat, J., & Moha, N. In Washizaki, H. & Zhang, H., editors, Proceedings of the 25<sup>th</sup> Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), pages 305–314, December, 2018. IEEE CS Press. 10 pages.

Paper abstract bibtex

J2EE applications tend to be multi-tier and multilanguage applications. They rely on the J2EE platform and containers that offer infrastructure and architectural services to ensure distributed, secure, safe, and scalable executions. These mechanisms hide many program dependencies, which helps development but hinders maintenance, evolution, and reengineering of J2EE applications. In this paper, we study (i) the J2EE specifications to extract a declarative specification of the dependencies that are inherent in the services offered and that are not visible in the user code that uses them. Then, we introduce (ii) a codification of the dependencies into rules, and (iii) a tool that supports the specification of those dependencies and their detection in a J2EE applications. We validate our approach and tool on a sample of 10 J2EE applications. We also compare our tool against JRipples, a state-of-the-art tool for change-impact analysis tasks. Results show that our tool adds, on average, 15% more call dependencies, which would have been missed otherwise. On change impact analysis tasks, our tool outperforms JRipples in all 10 applications, especially for the early iterations of change propagation exploration

@INPROCEEDINGS{Hecht18-APSEC-CodifyingDependencies,
   AUTHOR       = {Geoffrey Hecht and Hafedh Mili and El Boussaidi, Ghizlane and 
      Anis Boubaker and Manel Abdellatif and Yann-Gael Gu�h�neuc and 
      Anas Shatnawi and Jean Privat and Naouel Moha},
   BOOKTITLE    = {Proceedings of the 25<sup>th</sup> Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)},
   TITLE        = {Codifying Hidden Dependencies in Legacy J2EE 
      Applications},
   YEAR         = {2018},
   OPTADDRESS   = {},
   OPTCROSSREF  = {},
   EDITOR       = {Hironori Washizaki and Hongyu Zhang},
   MONTH        = {December},
   NOTE         = {10 pages.},
   OPTNUMBER    = {},
   OPTORGANIZATION = {},
   PAGES        = {305--314},
   PUBLISHER    = {IEEE CS Press},
   OPTSERIES    = {},
   OPTVOLUME    = {},
   KEYWORDS     = {Topic: <b>Code and design smells</b>, 
      Venue: <c>APSEC</c>},
   URL          = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/APSEC18.doc.pdf},
   PDF          = {http://www.ptidej.net/publications/documents/APSEC18.ppt.pdf},
   ABSTRACT     = {J2EE applications tend to be multi-tier and 
      multilanguage applications. They rely on the J2EE platform and 
      containers that offer infrastructure and architectural services to 
      ensure distributed, secure, safe, and scalable executions. These 
      mechanisms hide many program dependencies, which helps development 
      but hinders maintenance, evolution, and reengineering of J2EE 
      applications. In this paper, we study (i) the J2EE specifications to 
      extract a declarative specification of the dependencies that are 
      inherent in the services offered and that are not visible in the user 
      code that uses them. Then, we introduce (ii) a codification of the 
      dependencies into rules, and (iii) a tool that supports the 
      specification of those dependencies and their detection in a J2EE 
      applications. We validate our approach and tool on a sample of 10 
      J2EE applications. We also compare our tool against JRipples, a 
      state-of-the-art tool for change-impact analysis tasks. Results show 
      that our tool adds, on average, 15\% more call dependencies, which 
      would have been missed otherwise. On change impact analysis tasks, 
      our tool outperforms JRipples in all 10 applications, especially for 
      the early iterations of change propagation exploration}
}

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