CanaryApps

One of the pressing business cases is the transformation of legacy application into applications based on new technologies. CanaryApps plays a vital role in this respect. By resurgence we mean the migration of your legacy application into new, well architected, fully tested and elegantly documented application, while preserving its original business functionality, with less time and less cost.

When we talk about legacy applications, we may think about those applications that are running on XBase (DBase, Clipper, Foxbase, Foxpro), Paradox, MS Access, Excel, AS400, Java, ASP, or any application that its backend schema is on one of the supported databases by Hibernate or NHibernate

The CanaryApps methodology of the application resurgence consists of four phases: plan, execute, transform, and deploy.

Plan: You need to have a plan for what platform, operating system, target database, and/or application server, your new born application will be running on. Currently supported platforms are Java, .NET, or Flex. Operating systems for Java and Flex can be Windows, Linux, or any of the Unix flavors, while .Net is limited to Windows. Target databases can be either open-source or commercial ones. Similarly application servers can be open-source, or commercial ones. Microsoft .Net applications are usually deployed into IIS, while Java applications can be deployed on varities of application servers. Flex application can go either way.

You decide on which of the platform, operating systems, databases, application serves; based on the comfortable level of expertise and knowledge of your staff.

Execute: This is the heart of the process, where you need to extract your existing schema. You may be having a large enterprise schema, where one of your applications is using a set of tables/views, while another using different set of tables/views. These tables could be overlapping together. The effort is to extract these set of tables that each application is using. Fortunately, CanaryApps offers a free Schema Exporter that helps you accomplish this task. The next step is to upload the extracted schema into CanaryApps website; where you generate your application using any of the platforms, databases, and application servers.

Transform: The transform step is required in migrating your schema from your legacy database to any of the supported databases. CanaryApps supplies you with scripts to create your new schema, and then transform your existing data.

Deploy: is the step where your application is to be installed, configured, and ready to run on the target operating system and the application server. CanaryApps offers an Installer for each platform that helps you accomplish this task as well.

Compared to the big-bang theory of application re-engineering, or application migration, this approach is proven to work much easier.