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Model-driven reverse engineering of legacy graphical user interfaces

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Abstract

Businesses are increasingly beginning to modernise those of their legacy systems that were originally developed with Rapid Application Development (RAD) or Fourth Generation Language (4GL) environments, in order to benefit from new platforms and technologies. In these systems, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) layout is implicitly provided by the position of the GUI elements (i.e. coordinates). However, taking advantage of current features of GUI technologies often requires an explicit, high-level layout model. We propose a Model-Driven Engineering process with which to perform the automatic reverse engineering of RAD-built GUIs, which is focused on discovering the implicit layout, and produces a GUI model in which the layout is explicit. As an example of the approach, we apply an automatic reengineering process to this model in order to generate a Java Swing user interface.

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Notes

  1. A case study GUI taken from a real application that illustrates the reverse engineering process in detail can be found at www.modelum.es/guizmo.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Informática, Universidad de Murcia, Campus de Espinardo, 30100, Murcia, Spain

    Óscar Sánchez Ramón & Jesús García Molina

  2. Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Francisco Tomás y Valiente, 11, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Jesús Sánchez Cuadrado

Authors
  1. Óscar Sánchez Ramón
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  2. Jesús Sánchez Cuadrado
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  3. Jesús García Molina
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Correspondence to Jesús Sánchez Cuadrado.

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Sánchez Ramón, Ó., Sánchez Cuadrado, J. & García Molina, J. Model-driven reverse engineering of legacy graphical user interfaces. Autom Softw Eng 21, 147–186 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-013-0130-2

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