Solutions for Reverse Engineering 4GL Applications, Recovering the Design of a Logistical Wholesale System

Re-engineering a legacy software system to support new, modern technologies instead of old ones is not an easy task, especially for large systems with a complex architecture. The use of reverse engineering tools is crucial for different subtasks of the full process, such as re-documenting the old code or recovering its design. There are many tools available to assist developers, but most of these tools were designed to deal with third generation languages (e.g. Java, C, C++, C#). However, many large systems are developed in higher level languages (e.g. Magic, Informix, ABAP) and current tools are not able to support all the arising problems during re-engineering systems written in fourth generation languages. In this paper we present a project whose main goal is the development of a technologically and functionally renewed medicinal wholesale system. This system is developed in Magic 4GL, and its development is based on re-engineering an old Magic (version 5) system to uniPaaS, which is the current release version of Magic. In the early phases of this project we developed a reverse engineering toolset for Magic 4GL to support reverse engineering, recovering the design of the old system, and to support some forward engineering tasks too. Here we present a report on this project that was carried out in cooperation with SZEGED Software Zrt and the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged. The project was partly funded by the Economic Development Operational Programme, New Hungary Development Plan.