Creating the Legacy Analysis Workbency (LAW) Tool to Reuse Legacy Software by Universal Representation in XML and Code Generation

Reusing legacy software is a stumbling block that impedes cost-effective creation of new or updated software applications. This problem is squarely addressed here by a key innovation: rather than analyze legacy code from Ada, C++, FORTRAN, assembly, or other widely used languages directly, we represent the code and its operating environment in an XML model that is language independent and highly malleable. We build one powerful meta-tool to automate many steps in creating the model, analyzing it to identify code segments to reuse, surgically extract those portions, and export to new programming languages. The one meta-tool works across multiple programming languages. Harmonia, Inc. is creating this tool, called the Legacy Analysis Workbench. A user can visualize, search, browse, manipulate, and ask “what if” questions to navigate unfamiliar legacy code. Information gained during code analysis is aggregated into a knowledge base that permits inference about the code base, thereby establishing a permanent understanding of the code that outlasts the programmers working on the code. This approach reduces reuse cost today, and creates a cost-savings dividend years from now, because a library of XML models is easier to export to future programming languages than porting from the original and outdated programming languages.