Mainframe-Based Legacy Integration: An Industry Project

As a computing environment evolves, heterogeneous and distributed computing environments are often unavoidable. Companies are willing to retain their legacy systems and also acquire new types of systems for their daily business operations. Rewrite, facelift and convert are three common ways to address legacy integration for use in heterogeneous and distributed computing environments. Rewrite and convert may not be suitable for companies to reengineer their legacy systems because the companies have made significant investments in the systems. They are more willing to reduce the effort of their programming staff and minimize unnecessary rework. Therefore, it is essential to provide a cost effective approach to integrating legacy systems. In this paper, we present an extended facelift approach to integrating an industry mainframe-based software reengineering legacy system in a distributed heterogeneous computing environment. An experience of implementing the approach and lessons learned are also discussed.