Bridging Legacy and Business Components with Parameterizable Business Objects:

The BALES Methodology

Willem-Jan van den Heuvel and Michael Papazoglou

InfoLab, Tilburg University

5000 LE Tilburg

The Netherlands

ABSTRACT:

This paper describes the BALES (binding Business Objects to LEgacy Systems) methodology that aims at constructing parameterizable business objects to link (off-the-shelf) business components to legacy system components on the basis of their interface definitions. BALES results in business object interfaces that are parameterized in legacy and/or business(ERP)-components.

The BALES methodology is supported by an integrated toolset to automatically generate interface definitions on the basis of forward or reverse engineered (reference) models, and, deduce potential parameters of the business objects.

KEY WORDS: legacy system, business object, business change, enterprise architecture

Patel , D., Sutherland, J., Miller, J., (Eds.) Business Object Design and Implementation V: OOPSLA'99 Workshop Proceedings. Springer, 1999 (full text available at the Workshop).

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