Model-driven reverse engineering of legacy graphical user interfaces

Businesses are more and more modernizing the legacy systems they developed with Rapid Application Development (RAD), so that they can benefit from the new platforms and technologies. In these systems, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) layout is implicitly given by the position of the GUI elements (i.e. coordinates). However, taking advantage of current features of GUI technologies often requires an explicit, high-level layout model. We propose a Model-Driven Engineering process to perform reverse engineering of RAD-built GUIs, which is focused on discovering the implicit layout, and produces a GUI model where the layout is explicit. Based on the information we obtain, other reengineering activities can be performed, for example, to adapt the GUI for mobile device screens.

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