A Comparative Study of Using Object Oriented Approach and aspect Oriented Approach for the Evolution of Legacy System

• Published in: International journal of computer applications 2010-02, Vol.1 (7), p.90-94
• Main Authors: M Rizvi, S A, Khanam, Zeba
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communities; Evolution; Legacy; Methodology; Object oriented; Object-oriented programming; Organizations; Programming; Receiving
• ISSN: 0975-8887; 0975-8887
• DOI: 10.5120/158-281

Legacy systems are vital to an organization, and sometimes form the backbone of an organization, yet their maintenance and evolution had been an area of research for a long time. Besides being costly to maintain, legacy systems often lag behind changes in the businesses they support. The challenge in today's environment is to develop a methodology to migrate older systems to newer, more cost effective client-server distributed processing platforms that support standards-based modular architectures. One approach is to employ a "wrapper" of code that surrounds the existing legacy code, turning it into an object. This could be stated as an object oriented approach to legacy systems. However, there are many other paradigms that a legacy system might adopt. Aspect-oriented technology is another emerging programming paradigm that is receiving considerable attention from research and practitioner communities alike. Nowadays much of the work is carried on, on developing different methodologies to enable aspect oriented programming to be applied to legacy systems. In this paper, we try to analyze the impact of object oriented technology and aspect oriented technology on legacy systems and the environment that is required to implement the two paradigms. The advantages and disadvantages of both the paradigms have been explored, and a comparative study of both the paradigms is done and analyzed in the light of legacy systems.