Ghizlane El Boussaidi

Alvine B. Belle, Ghizlane El Boussaidi, Timothy C. Lethbridge et al.

Architectural reconstruction is a reverse engineering activity aiming at recovering the missing decisions on a system. It can help identify the components, within a legacy software application, according to the application's architectural pattern. It is useful to identify architectural technical debt. We are interested in identifying layers within a layered application since the layered pattern is one of the most used patterns to structure large systems. Earlier component reconstruction work focusing on that pattern relied on generic component identification criteria, such as cohesion and coupling. Recent work has identified architectural-pattern specific criteria to identify components within that pattern. However, the architectural-pattern specific criteria that the layered pattern embodies are loosely defined. In this paper, we present a first systematic literature review (SLR) of the literature aiming at inventorying such criteria for layers within legacy applications and grouping them under four principles that embody the fundamental design principles under-lying the architectural pattern. We identify six such criteria in the form of design rules. We also perform a second systematic literature review to synthesize the literature on software architecture reconstruction in the light of these criteria. We report those principles, the rules they encompass, their representation, and their usage in software architecture reconstruction.

Anas Shatnawi, Hafedh Mili, Manel Abdellatif et al.

Identifying dependency call graphs of multilanguage software systems using static code analysis is challenging. The different languages used in developing today's systems often have different lexical, syntactical, and semantic rules that make thorough analysis difficult. Also, they offer different modularization and dependency mechanisms, both within and between components. Finally, they promote and--or require varieties of frameworks offering different sets of services, which introduce hidden dependencies, invisible with current static code analysis approaches. In this paper, we identify five important challenges that static code analysis must overcome with multilanguage systems and we propose requirements to handle them. Then, we present solutions of these requirements to handle JEE applications, which combine server-side Java source code with a number of client-side Web dialects (e.g., JSP, JSF) while relying on frameworks (e.g., Web and EJB containers) that create hidden dependencies. Finally, we evaluate our implementations of the solutions by developing a set of tools to analyze JEE applications to build a dependency call graph and by applying these tools on two sample JEE applications. Our evaluation shows that our tools can solve the identified challenges and improve the recall in the identification of multilanguage dependencies compared to standard JEE static code analysis and, thus, indirectly that the proposed requirements are useful to build multilanguage static code analysis.

Anas Shatnawi, Hafedh Mili, Manel Abdellatif et al.

In this paper, we answer a set of research questions that are required to develop service identification approach based on the analysis of object- oriented software. Such research questions are: (1) what is a service, (2) how are services different from software components, (3) what are types of services, (4) what are existing service identification approaches that consider service types into account, and (5) how to identify services based on the object-oriented source code with respect to their types. Our methodology is based on performing a literature review to identify the answers of these research questions. Also, we propose a taxonomy of service types.

Anas Shatnawi, Hafedh Mili, Manel Abdellatif et al.

In this report, we propose our approach that identifies a KDM model of JSP pages. Our approach is based on two main steps. The first one aims to reduce the problem space by translating JSP pages into Java Servlets where we can use existing tools to identify a KDM model. The second step aims to complete the resulting KDM model by identifying dependencies of JSP tags that are not codified by the translation step.

Anas Shatnawi, Hafedh Mili, Manel Abdellatif et al.

In this paper, we propose a program slicing approach for the output stream object in JEE applications. Our approach is based on extracting a dependency call graph from KDM models of JEE applications. Then, it applies breath-first search algorithm to identify the program slice as a graph reachability problem. The proposed approach is implemented as an extension of our DeJEE tool.

Anas Shatnawi, Hafedh Mili, Manel Abdellatif et al.

Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) applications are implemented in terms of a set of components developed based on several JEE technologies includ- ing, but not limited to, Servlet, JSP, JSF, EJB, JavaBeans. These JEE technologies rely on a varied set of communication mechanisms to commu- nicate between each others. Examples of these communication mechanisms are HTTP requests, Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Java DateBase Connectivity (JDBC), etc. These communication mechanisms represent program dependencies between JEE components. However, one communi- cation mechanism can be implemented following different implementation ways by different JEE technologies. Therefore, to be able to detect related dependencies, we identify these implementation ways used by a set of JEE technologies. In this technical report, we focus on the Web tier technologies that are Servlets, JSPs and JSFs. Also, we present how these technologies access the JavaBeans and Manage Beans components.