Web Service Interface for Legacy Virtual Product Lifecycle Management System

Abstract: Enterprises have deployed Legacy Systems to carry out the mission critical business processes within its current IT infrastructure. Legacy Systems being primary assets of the organization, the key challenge of such systems is reusing and leveraging the valuable business logic that resides within these applications. Despite the significant business value provided by the legacy systems, to conform to the changing business needs demands transition of these legacy systems towards modern architecture. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) an architectural approach helps enterprises in reuse of existing assets as well as addressing increasing business demands. An effective way of migration of legacy systems to SOA is through exposing their functionality as services. SOA approach constitutes various advantages that employ standard, platform independent, well-defined service interfaces, which is suitable for realizing enterprise application integration with other systems. There has been a growing interest in the legacy system to SOA modernization among the academic and industrial research community. The methods proposed by this community primarily focus on how the critical business logic of the legacy system is migrated i.e. how to convert the functionality of existing systems into services to gain the benefits of SOA. This research focuses on investigating the feasibility of providing web service access to the data stored in legacy vPLM system. It also involves developing a prototype taking application integration best practices, Scania IT SOA guidelines and metrics such as reusability, performance and security into account.