Aiming Towards Modernization: Visualization to Assist Structural Understanding of Oracle Forms Applications

Oracle Forms is a tool for creating screens that interact with an Oracle database. It appeared in the eighties and its use spread to many IT sectors today. There are pressures that push software engineers to modernize Oracle Forms applications: obsolescence of technology, requirements of users, etc. For a straightforward modernization, it is necessary to comprehend the applications from a prior step. This paper reports the preliminary results of the ”Forms Modernization” project, in particular, of the understanding step. In most cases, the understanding of Forms applications is a complex and time-consuming task due to several reasons: large size of applications, lack of design documentation, lack of software organization. This paper proposes a visualization process to alleviate these issues. The process takes static Oracle Forms code as input and produces a set of domain specific diagrams/views, that ranges from high to low abstraction levels, as output. The gist of diagrams and views is to assist engineers in a structural understanding of the Oracle Forms software. The process includes algorithms for element discovery and clustering, and is instrumented by means of a tool running on Eclipse Modeling technologies. We take advantage of four real Oracle Forms applications to illustrate the benefits of this approach. These applications have been provided by Asesoftware, which is the Colombian industrial partner of the project. Keywords—program comprehension; reverse engineering; tools; clustering algorithms; model-driven engineering; graphical editors.