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4GL to J2EE Conversion Tools?
FunkyGibbin' asks: "I've just started with a new company that has outsourced a project to translate a 4GL language - some 1.5 million lines of it - into J2EE. It's way behind schedule, and keeps on tripping over itself at acceptance test points (one item is fixed, others are broken). The outsourcing company chose as their conversion tool IBM's Rexx. They don't parse the 4GL to a syntax tree and then generate from that. They 'match patterns' which then generates the output. In addition, they're not even using the object oriented features of Rexx; it's in procedural Rexx! They have no regression test suite that runs through the original system and the newly generated system to ensure that they produce the same result [this apparently was 'our job' to do it manually]. Frankly, I consider the outsourcing company to have adopted completely the wrong approach, but I'm happy to be proven wrong if compiler construction or language translation experts can tell me that Rexx was their best choice, or even a reasonable choice! Any and all information gratefully accepted - this project has so far cost many dollars, and the board is unsure what to do with it."
Outsource the conversion to India and go play golf. You can probably still get in a good 18 before the sun goes down if you're on the East Coast.
Is your browser retarded?
It's a gigantic project being run by people who don't know what they are doing. You're all screwed, it's only going to get worse. If you push to meet the deadlines it will get a lot worse. Read "Death March" my Ed Yourdon and spend your time contemplating what a shame it is the IT industry is so slow at the moment.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
See what you really want is a Peer-To-peer B2B Distributed Cluster of High Availablity C# Tablet-PS Servers running a Micro-Kerenel Database. Preferably using Wi-Fi over Firewire. Oh yeah, don't forget that you need some of that Linux in there too. I've heard that that's good for cross-platform open-source binary-only drivers.
OOP is sooooo early 90's, that I'm supriesed your project is still being funded.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Take it from some folks who've been there and done that -- in a much smaller way and have nevertheless gone through a lot of pain.
For the transition from WebObjects 4.5 to WebObjects 5.0, the developers at Apple created a converter that transforms Objective-C source code to Java source code. This was done by parsing the Objective-C source, creating a parse tree, and then running scripts against the parse tree. Simple pattern matching was found to be inadequate.
This was a much smaller project than the one that you seem to be involved in. Why? First off, as computer languages go Objective-C and Java are very, very close in terms of structure and design. Second, even with the talent involved in this project -- whom I am completely in awe of -- they only created an 80% solution. The goal was to produce something that could get a developer well down the road on the way to a conversion, not do the entire conversion.
Then, the Apple engineers tested this tool in the harshest environment possible -- their own code. It was used to convert the entire WebObjects source code from Objective-C to Java; they made it work before releasing it to customers.
Management needs to take a step back and ask, "what the heck are we trying to do here, anyway?" Unfortunately, it sounds a lot like your management has their heads 'way up in the wrong place. A useful piece that I read recently is the Happy Valley Tax Authority case study. <HINT>Consider yourself lucky that your resume is relatively current.</HINT>
--Paul