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Migrating legacy engineering applications to Java
| Content Provider | ACM Digital Library |
|---|---|
| Author | Dickens, Tom |
| Abstract | The Boeing Company, like many other engineering-centric companies, has a large base of legacy applications written in FORTRAN and C. In today's computing environment, maintaining and evolving these applications is becoming difficult. One such Boeing application, the Aero Grid and Paneling System (AGPS), is a 3D-geometry surface modeling tool. In the fall of 2001 we completed the migration of the AGPS source code from 300,000 lines of mixed C and FORTRAN to 150,000 lines of 100% Java. The migration resulted in many benefits; some anticipated and some unexpected. The benefits include widespread portability of AGPS on engineering workstations and PC-class machines, allowing AGPS to embrace many modern programming capabilities readily available in Java, greatly improving the maintainability and enhanceability of the AGPS source code, and an increased robustness of the AGPS code. During the migration we also took the opportunity to rearchitect major areas of the code using object-oriented techniques, to modernize the graphical user interface, and to implement a significant number of pending enhancements from our backlog.This paper looks into the details of the AGPS migration to Java, discussing our observations, lessons learned, migration techniques, and what we see in the future computing environment. Data are presented and discussed to substantiate our conclusions that Java is well-suited for compute-intensive engineering applications, Java portability is a reality, Java performance is no longer a problem, and that embracing object-oriented programming techniques produces a much superior product with less effort. |
| File Format | |
| ISBN | 1581134711 |
| DOI | 10.1145/604251.604260 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| Publisher Date | 2002-11-04 |
| Publisher Place | New York |
| Access Restriction | Subscribed |
| Subject Keyword | Java C Legacy Portability Conversion Fortran |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
