A Hybrid Architecture for the Incremental Migration of a Web Front-end

Nowadays, software migration is an effective solution to adopt new technologies while reusing the business value of existing applications. Among other challenges, the size and complexity of large applications are obstacles that increase the risks of migration projects. Moreover, the migration can imply a switch of programming languages. This is the case when migrating from Java to TypeScript. Thus, it is hard to migrate large and complex applications in one straightforward step. Incremental approaches have been designed to counter this problem. These approaches are based on hybrid architecture usages. However, none of the approaches use a hybrid architecture for GUI defined with different programming languages. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid architecture that enables the incremental migration of web applications. Our architecture is based on Web Components that allow legacy technology artifacts to work with modern ones. We implement the architecture and use it in the case of migrating GWT applications to Angular. Then, we validate its usability in a real context by migrating an industrial web application.