Service Discovery Using a Semantic Algorithm in a SOA Modernization Process from Legacy Web Applications

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) offer a suitable solution to manage the continuous changes in companies business processes. SOA facilitates the alignment of business process with underlying system services. There is a high percentage of Legacy Web Applications (LWA) developed by software factories that were implemented by using Model-View Controller (MVC) frameworks and without considering SOA in their development process. In this context, many companies are performing a modernization of their systems to be adapted to SOA. However, this migration is usually carried out ad-hoc by means of not reusable and error-prone manual processes. Additionally, these migration processes are often performed at a low abstraction level, close to code, hindering reusability and maintainability of the obtained systems. In this paper a Model-Driven systematic and semi-automatic approach to modernize legacy web applications to SOA is presented. The approach eases the reutilization of the process at different domains, since the underlying services of the LWA are identified and generated from model-driven techniques, but also of the new generated system since these new services may be offered as an interoperable service layer. Although the paper completely introduces the approach, it mainly focuses on the semantic process defined to discover services of the LWA that may be later associated (aligned) to the company business processes.