Web-enabling legacy applications

A recent research trend in Web applications is the integration of legacy applications on the World Wide Web. The motivations behind this research are the goals of producing a hybrid system where the Web can provide greater accessibility and distribution for legacy applications, and some standards to increase the interoperability and ease of use. For user interaction driven legacy applications, we propose a 3-tier conceptual architecture to support applications for the WWW, and present a approach to building sophisticated inactive Web systems. We benefit from this modelling approach in terms of universal accessibility, platform independency, modularity and migration efficiency. The interaction scenario between the client and server in the prototype implementation is an example to demonstrate the procedures for migrating a legacy application to the Web. Some basic technologies are reviewed and deployed for implementation of our design, including Java applet, servlet, JDBC and CORBA. Such an approach can also be extended to the newly developed Web based applications.