Migrating a Legacy Web-Based Document-Analysis Application to Hadoop and HBase
Himanshu Vashishtha, Michael A. Smit, Eleni Stroulia · IGI Global eBooks · 2012
Migrating a legacy application to a more modern computing platform is a recurring software-development activity. This chapter describes the authors’ experience with a contemporary rendition of this activity, migrating a Web-based system to a service-oriented application on two different cloud software platforms, Hadoop and HBase. Using the case study as a running example, they review the information needed for a successful migration and examine the trade-offs between development/re-design effort and performance/scalability improvements. The two levels of re-design, towards Hadoop and HBase, require notably different levels of effort, and as the authors found through exercising the migrated applications, they achieve different benefits. The authors found that both redesigns led to substantial benefit in performance improvement, and that expending the additional effort required by the more complex migration resulted in notable improvements in the ability to leverage the benefits of the platform.