Chapter 1. Introduction

You can migrate and modernize applications by using the Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.

The MTA plugin analyzes your projects using customizable rulesets, marks issues in the source code, provides guidance to fix the issues, and offers automatic code replacement, if possible.

The plugin supports both the Community Edition and the Ultimate version of IntelliJ IDEA.

What is the Migration Toolkit for Applications?

Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) accelerates large-scale application modernization efforts across hybrid cloud environments on Red Hat OpenShift. This solution provides insight throughout the adoption process, at both the portfolio and application levels: inventory, assess, analyze, and manage applications for faster migration to OpenShift via the user interface.

In MTA 7.1 and later, when you add an application to the Application Inventory, MTA automatically creates and executes language and technology discovery tasks. Language discovery identifies the programming languages used in the application. Technology discovery identifies technologies, such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Spring, etc. Then, each task assigns appropriate tags to the application, reducing the time and effort you spend manually tagging the application.

MTA uses an extensive default questionnaire as the basis for assessing your applications, or you can create your own custom questionnaire, enabling you to estimate the difficulty, time, and other resources needed to prepare an application for containerization. You can use the results of an assessment as the basis for discussions between stakeholders to determine which applications are good candidates for containerization, which require significant work first, and which are not suitable for containerization.

MTA analyzes applications by applying one or more rulesets to each application considered to determine which specific lines of that application must be modified before it can be modernized.

MTA examines application artifacts, including project source directories and application archives, and then produces an HTML report highlighting areas needing changes.

How does the Migration Toolkit for Applications simplify migration?

The Migration Toolkit for Applications looks for common resources and known trouble spots when migrating applications. It provides a high-level view of the technologies used by the application.

MTA generates a detailed report evaluating a migration or modernization path. This report can help you to estimate the effort required for large-scale projects and to reduce the work involved.