Reengineering Legacy Systems with RESTful Web Service

Most of the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) applications are not brand new and usually evolved from legacy systems. Legacy systems carry out the enterprisepsilas most crucial business information together with business processes and many organizations have leveraged the value of their legacy systems by exposing parts of it as services. Most of current Web services are SOAP-RPC style services. The evolution of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has led to the increased adoption of the RESTful services paradigm and reengineering legacy system to SOA with RESTful Web services is not only for reusing but will bring other benefits due to its special features. In this paper, the key issues for reengineering legacy systems with RESTful Web services are discussed. A common process for reengineering legacy systems to REST-style is proposed. The candidate Web services are identified by legacy systems comprehension at first. Then blend services are generated based on relationships between entities and constraint rules specified. The generated URIs are refined and split carefully to represent the RESTful Web services.