The State of Smalltalk to Java Transformation: Approaches Review

The world of software engineering is an ever-changing landscape of tools, languages, and technologies. The most difficult kind of technological transition is the transfer of a system from one programming language to another, which might be necessary for increasing number of legacy systems, as their original architecture cannot cope with modern requirements. In this paper, we aim to provide readers with an overview of the current state of research on transformation from Smalltalk to other object-oriented languages, with the main focus on transformation to Java. We first compare the two languages and then continue with section containing analysis of existing works in three subsections. All of the projects were then compared in a separate section, with a special focus on the level of automation, availability of the tools, compatibility with current technologies, and expandability of the translated application.