engleski

phpModeler - an approach to Reverse Engineering legacy Web applications

Web applications are complex systems that are in the core of many businesses. However, their development is, contrary to other domains, not characterized by rigorous software engineering methods. The consequence is that many web applications are poorly structured and are not adequately documented, which leads to difficult maintenance. One way for dealing with web application complexity is their modeling on a higher level of abstraction. In this paper we present phpModeler, a tool for reverse engineering legacy PHP web applications. It generates UML diagrams showing resources that each web page is using, web page’s functions, dependencies it has on other web pages, and the flow of execution. Once the models have been created, phpModeler can analyze them and generate dependency models for each entity in every web page model. phpModeler can also be used to highlight the difference between page models – a feature that, when combined with an SVN repository shows the way how a web page has evolved over time. Tool usability has been tested on a case study application – iForestFire.

Reverse engineering; application maintenance; architecture recovery; legacy web applications; application evolution

nije evidentirano