Generating Wrappers for Command Line Programs: The Cal-Aggie Wrap-O-Matic Project

Abstract

Software developers writing new software have strong incentives to make their products compliant to standards such as CORBA, COM, and Java Beans. Standards compliance facilitates interoperability, component based software assembly, and software reuse, thus leading to improved quality and productivity. Legacy software, on the other hand, is usually monolithic and hard to maintain and adapt. Many organizations, saddled with entrenched legacy software, are confronted with the need to integrate legacy assets into more modern, distributed, componentized systems that provide critical business services. Thus, wrapping legacy systems for interoperability has been an area of considerable interest. Wrappers are usually constructed by hand which can be costly and error-prone. We specifically target command-line oriented legacy systems and describe a tool framework that automates away some of the drudgery of constructing wrappers for these systems. We describe the Cal-Aggie Wrap-O-Matic system (CAWOM), and illustrate its use to create CORBA wrappers for: a) the JDB debugger, thus supporting distributed debugging using other CORBA components; and b) the Apache Web server, thus allowing remote Web server administration, potentially mediated by CORBA-compliant security services. While CORBA has some limitations, in several relatively common settings it can produce better wrappers at lower cost.