A WSAD-Based Fact Extractor for J2EE Web Projects
Holger M. Kienle, Hausi A. Müller · 2007
This paper describes our implementation of a fact extractor for J2EE Web applications. Fact extractors are part of each reverse engineering toolset; their output is used by reverse engineering analyzers and visualizers. Our fact extractor has been implemented on top of IBM's Websphere Application Developer (WSAD). The extractor's schema has been defined with the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) using a graphical modeling approach. The extractor extensively reuses functionality provided by WSAD, EMF, and Eclipse, and is an example of component-based development. In this paper, we show how we used this development approach to accomplish the construction of our fact extractor, which, as a result, could be realized with significantly less code and in shorter time compared to a homegrown extractor implemented from scratch. We have assessed our extractor and the produced facts with a table- based and a graph-based visualizer. Both visualizers are integrated with Eclipse.