Many businesses depend on legacy systems, which often use outdated technology that complicates maintenance and updates. Therefore, software modernization is essential, particularly data migration between different database schemas. Established methodologies, like model transformation and ETL tools, facilitate this migration. However, these methodologies require deep knowledge of database languages and both the source and target schemas. This necessity renders data migration an error-prone and cognitively demanding task. Our objective is to alleviate developers’ workloads during schema evolution by proposing DAMI-Framework. This framework incorporates a domain-specific language (DSL) and a parser to facilitate data migration between database schemas. DAMI-DSL simplifies schema mapping, while the parser automates SQL script generation. To evaluate DAMI-Framework, we conducted an empirical evaluation with 21 developers to assess their experiences using our DSL versus traditional SQL. The study allows us to measure their perceptions of the DSL properties and user experience. The participants praised DAMI-DSL for its readability and ease of use. The findings indicate that our framework has positive impact in data migration efforts compared to SQL scripts, by reducing the lines of code and characters required for the migration by 18.3% and 35.6%, respectively.

Since internet applications have reached a satisfactory level of maturity, large information systems have been developed to manage and facilitate access to documents. Simultaneously, there was an enormous international effort to digitise documents, enabling access via the internet. This endeavour facilitated the access of researchers to extensive document repositories and libraries, while also aiding companies in organising their documents. Two decades later, these vast databases are reasonably clean and well-organised, although the software used to manage and feed them is gradually becoming obsolete. Therefore, it is imperative to continuously reengineer the software to maintain optimal functionality. Furthermore, after the initial effort to digitise documents and create the initial metadata, it is reasonable to augment the metadata information pertaining to the documents. As such, two necessities are apparent: improving support for reengineering legacy document information systems and enabling data model updates and schema evolution to accommodate new information. Our goal is to automate the reengineering process as a whole.

Digital Libraries have become popular nowadays since important libraries all over the world started distributing their collections online, properly classified, and, in many cases, with access to the digital version of the resource. These programs have been beneficial to the general population as well as research groups in fields such as language and literature. Nonetheless, since their creation is a time-consuming and costly process, small organizations are forced to rely on obsolete or poorly designed software. However, most of the features, including the data model, are shared by this type of system, with minor variations depending on the type of resources to be handled. This article presents a Software Product Line (SPL) for the semi-automatic generation of Digital Libraries (DL). Our SPL allows developers to specify which DL features are required, which will define the data model variationand the generated source code. The specification is then transformed into a fully functional DL application with the specified features that is ready for deployment. We present the feature model, the SPL implementation, and acase study on three sample projects that enabled us to evaluate the resulting software, with a focus on development effort savings.