Phase 2: Application Migration Assessment
pHase ii: appliCation migRation assessment In order to be aware of the full scope of migration, it is important to assess what technologies are currently used by the applications and their migration targets. The typical enterprise application makes use of several technologies for security, caching, clustering, and injection. These technologies are largely hidden from the average application developer and they might not be aware of them, but they can have a major impact on the performance and scalability of the application. Failing to plan for the migration of these technologies can create serious challenges. These will generally crop up at the end of a migration project when performance testing is carried out. So it is vital to assess not only the technologies, but also the specific features used, in order to determine the most appropriate alternative. A key element of application migration will be the identification of proprietary libraries that may have been used in the development of the application. JBoss provides a Migration Analysis Tool (MAT) for assessing the amount of proprietary code that will have to be switched out for open source libraries. Details for using it can be found at: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossMASS-MigrationAssesmentTool-GettingStarted More information is available from: http://www.jboss.org/mass/mat.html The next step will be to identify required configurations and potential gaps between existing feature sets and open source capabilities. There are nearly always open source equivalents, or equivalents can be produced with relatively minor customizations. Finally, an assessment should be made of the difficulty of migration for each application. One should plan to order the migration process from easiest to most difficult. Starting with the easiest applications will build knowledge and confidence in your team