Migrating legacy data structures based on variable overlay to Java

Legacy information systems, such as banking systems, are usually organized around their data model. Hence, when these systems are migrated to modern environments, translation of the data model involves the most critical decisions, having strong implications on the rest of the translation. In this paper, we report our experience and describe the approaches adopted in migrating a large banking system (ten million lines of code) to Java, starting from a proprietary data model which gives programmers explicit control of the variable overlay in memory. After presenting the basic translation scheme, we discuss the exceptions that may occur in practice. Then, we consider two heuristic approaches useful to reduce the number of cases where a behavior equivalent to that of unions must be reproduced in Java. Finally, we comment on the experimental results obtained so far. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.