Discussion Forum 1

by Ritu Juneja - Monday, May 25, 2020, 10:11 PM

 
The CIO of your organization has requested a formal analysis for transitioning your
current legacy software (i.e. COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG.) to a web based system using
typical HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL.

            The most common reason for most enterprises to transition and renovate their legacy
software application is to keep up with the dynamic business requirements and customer needs
(Vecchio, 2019). This is achieved by either developing the code from scratch on the modern
application systems or moving the complete legacy application platform to another. As a result of
the innumerable transformation and upgradations of the new platforms, languages are
differentiated as legacy and modern based on age, popularity, requirement, flexibility, etc.
However, the legacy software is the foundation of most applications (desktop or web) and even
modern artificial intelligence methodology (Vecchio, 2019). Many organizations even now want
their employees to gain the basic knowledge of the legacy software and programming languages
before participating in the transition process. For example, Common Business Oriented
Language (COBOL) emerged in 1959, principally designed for businesses and is still actively
used in many finance and banking sectors to develop powerful and secured software
applications (Kumavat, 2020). Nevertheless, the traditional application environment while
working with COBOL on the mainframe does not match up with the expectations of current
emerging programmers such as structured control statement, data structures, data abstractions,
syntax checking while writing the code or at runtime, autocomplete features for the defined
variables, open-source accessibility, etc. (Ottinger, 2016). Organizations invested resources and
efforts to make the COBOL programming more agile and upgrade it to match up the features of
the modern programming languages like JAVA, HTML, CSS, PERL, etc.

            Web-based programming languages are much faster than the legacy applications as they
require few lines of code with enhanced readability and scalability (Ottinger, 2016). High-level
object-oriented programming languages such as Python, Perl, C++, JAVA has built-in data
structures and abstraction, modules, numerous free libraries, interfaces, dynamic typing,
packages which attract the programmer to develop the applications efficiently and on a flexible
and friendly environment.

References

Kumavat, S. (2020). Legacy languages still pretty hard to beat. Retrieved from
https://www.codementor.io/@saurabhkumawat/legacy-languages-still-pretty-hard-to-beat-
14hzfl670y

Ottinger, J, B. (2016). The reasons the COBOL language is irrelevant -- and why Java's okay.
Retrieved from https://www.theserverside.com/opinion/The-reasons-the-COBOL-language-is-
irrelevant-and-why-Javas-okay

Vecchio, D. (2019). Why legacy application development is a challenge. Retrieved from

https://devops.com/why-legacy-application-development-is-a-challenge/

 
Discussion forum 1
by Karishma Pirani - Monday, May 25, 2020, 7:55 PM
 
Hello Everyone, 

Firstly, legacy software remains significant, moreover, linked with a particular version
of an operating system or hardware model that ought to reach out to a far extent.
Legacy software could be established indirectly as antiquated software that is up to
the present date performing a valuable function for the center. It is software systems
are applications that are totally controlled by the center while possessing every
probable initial value. Examples of such legacy programming languages are COBOL
and FORTRAN. The disadvantages of continuing with legacy software are that there
a decrease in security caused due to the old software not capable of being adaptable
towards making the constant adjustments to surpass the upcoming threats. It is
expensive to maintain and update older versions with the latest facilities. The lack of
supporting files and data formats after a certain point leaves it to be not so
compatible with the development of the formating. Also, established tools in older
software tend to be outdated, giant, which makes it challenging to modify and
customize. Secondly, Web-based applications are a particular sort of software that
permits users to associate with a remote server within a network browser interface.
Web-based apps are operated on specific servers, which are supervised frequently
by expert Web managers. This determines that any potential flaws or interventions
will be remarked and addressed instantly. Web-based systems store every user data
in the cloud - a dominant server that can maintain your data and immediately issue it
to users of your software if requested. Overall moving from legacy software to a web-
based system is much easier to customize and modify to your likings. The
maintaining and support cost will reduce by a lot as it isn't that hard to do so. The
security level is much better for the web-based system compared to the older legacy
software. 

References:

Lewis, G.J., Plakosh, D., Seacord, R.C. (2003). Modernizing Legacy

Systems. Pearson Education.

Crotty, J., & Horrocks, I. (2016, December 21). Managing legacy system costs: A
case study of a meta-assessment model to identify solutions in a large financial
services company. Retrieved from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210832716301260

Thank you 

Best Regards

Karishma P. 
Website Migration
by Karthik Guntupalli - Saturday, May 23, 2020, 5:43 PM
 
We had the exact same conversation at our workspace last year if we should keep running the
legacy systems or should we update all our systems to the more modern programming language
like PHP using one of its frameworks Laravel. One of the disadvantages of having the older
system is that all the developers that know that language are close to their retirement and there
is no demand for those languages anymore for someone to learn those languages today.
Therefore, finding someone to maintain these systems would be difficult and has to be changed
to a programming language where the resources are unlimited so you can keep building new
content and it will be easier for maintenance as well. That’s what happened with the websites I
was working on last year at the National Institute of Health. One more advantage of using the
programming language such as PHP is that your website can now provide a graphical user
interface which it did not before and everything used to run on a green or blue screen unless you
were using some other software like CGIDEV2 or something similar to that. (Forbes, 2012). This
makes it easier for everyone to use the website in an efficient manner without having to worry
about learning all the programs to operate such systems like before. This actually made all
processes very efficient when dealing with a lot of data for our data scientists at our workplace
and they were thrilled when they first started using these systems. I think most of the legacy
software is still being mostly by the government organizations which are still stuck in the 60s
which is when all these are developed and it is time to move on to the newer technology that is
available.

References

Forbes, A. (2012). The Joy of PHP: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Interactive Web
Applications with PHP and MySQL.
Discussion Forum 1
by Dheeraj Sai Naga - Wednesday, May 20, 2020, 1:29 PM
 
 

Transition from Current Legacy Software

Dheeraj Sai Naga

May 20, 2020

The legacy systems such as those associated with COBOL and RPG can be used to depict the
systems that have been operational for a long time. Since it is a past technology, it may be
obsolete, and the services offered may not be very relevant as during the first time of deployment
(Givehchi, Landsdorf, Simoens, & Colombo, 2017). Various benefits are thus associated with
transiting from such a technology to that making use of the web-based system. The advantages
include minimizing the cost of maintenance. The above is because maintaining the legacy
systems could be more expensive than replacing the hardware and software to a web based
system (Heil & Gaedke, 2017).

The second advantage is minimizing the lack of understanding, which may be experienced with
the legacy systems on how they run. The web-based systems are easy to fathom on how they
function since they are current and mostly utilized. The third advantage is improving security
features by shifting to web-based systems, which are coupled with improved security. The legacy
systems may lack security patches and thus increasing vulnerability that may put the system at
risk of being compromised. The fourth advantage of migrating to the web-based system is to
improve integration since older systems may be prone to incompatibility (Heil & Gaedke, 2017).

Various disadvantages associated with shifting from legacy systems to web-based ones include
customized solutions. If an organization had built a highly customized system, it would be
detrimental to replace it. The second disadvantage with the transition is resistance to change.
The above can be experienced with some units in the organization (Althani & Khaddaj, 2017).

References

Althani, B., & Khaddaj, S. (2017, October). Systematic review of legacy system migration.
In 2017 16th International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Applications to Business,
Engineering and Science (DCABES) (pp. 154-157). IEEE.

Givehchi, O., Landsdorf, K., Simoens, P., & Colombo, A. W. (2017). Interoperability for industrial
cyber-physical systems: An approach for legacy systems. IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Informatics, 13(6), 3370-3378.

Heil, S., & Gaedke, M. (2017, April). Web Migration. In Proceedings of the 12th International
Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (pp. 255-262).
SCITEPRESS-Science and Technology Publications, Lda.