Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. About the CLI Guide
This guide is for engineers, consultants, and others who want to use the Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) to migrate Java applications, .NET applications, or other components. In MTA 7.1 and later, you can use MTA to analyze applications written in languages other than Java. To run analysis on applications written in languages other than Java, add a custom rule set and do not specify a target language. This guide describes how to install and run the CLI, review the generated reports, and take advantage of additional features.
.NET migration is a Developer Preview feature only. Developer Preview features are not supported by Red Hat in any way and are not functionally complete or production-ready. Do not use Developer Preview features for production or business-critical workloads. Developer Preview features provide early access to upcoming product features in advance of their possible inclusion in a Red Hat product offering, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. These features might not have any documentation, are subject to change or removal at any time, and testing is limited. Red Hat might provide ways to submit feedback on Developer Preview features without an associated SLA.
Analyzing applications written in a language other than Java is a Developer Preview feature only. Developer Preview features are not supported by Red Hat in any way and are not functionally complete or production-ready. Do not use Developer Preview features for production or business-critical workloads. Developer Preview features provide early access to upcoming product features in advance of their possible inclusion in a Red Hat product offering, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process. These features might not have any documentation, are subject to change or removal at any time, and testing is limited. Red Hat might provide ways to submit feedback on Developer Preview features without an associated SLA.
1.2. About the Migration Toolkit for Applications
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.
1.2.1. Supported Migration Toolkit for Applications migration paths
The Migration Toolkit for Applications (MTA) supports the following migrations:
- Migrating from third-party enterprise application servers, such as Oracle WebLogic Server, to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP).
- Upgrading to the latest release of JBoss EAP.
- Migrating from a Windows-only .NET 4.5+ Framework to cross-platform .NET 8.0. (Developer Preview)
MTA provides a comprehensive set of rules to assess the suitability of your applications for containerization and deployment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP). You can run an MTA analysis to assess your applications' suitability for migration to multiple target platforms.
| Source platform ⇒ | Migration to JBoss EAP 7 & 8 | OpenShift (cloud readiness) | OpenJDK 11, 17, and 21 | Jakarta EE 9 | Camel 3 & 4 | Spring Boot in Red Hat Runtimes | Quarkus | Open Liberty |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle WebLogic Server | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - |
| IBM WebSphere Application Server | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | ✔ |
| JBoss EAP 4 | ✘ [a] | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - |
| JBoss EAP 5 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - |
| JBoss EAP 6 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - |
| JBoss EAP 7 | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | ✔ | - |
| Thorntail | ✔ [b] | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Oracle JDK | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - |
| Camel 2 | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | ✔ | - | - | - |
| Spring Boot | - | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | - | ✔ | ✔ | - |
| Any Java application | - | ✔ | ✔ | - | - | - | - | - |
| Any Java EE application | - | - | - | ✔ | - | - | - | - |
[a]
Although MTA does not currently provide rules for this migration path, Red Hat Consulting can assist with migration from any source platform to JBoss EAP 7.
[b]
Requires JBoss Enterprise Application Platform expansion pack 2 (EAP XP 2)
| ||||||||
- .NET migration paths: Source platform ⇒ Target platform (Developer Preview)
| Source platform ⇒ | OpenShift (cloud readiness) | Migration to .NET 8.0 |
|---|---|---|
| .NET Framework 4.5+ (Windows only) | ✔ | ✔ |
For more information about use cases and migration paths, see the MTA for developers web page.
1.3. The MTA CLI
The CLI is a command-line tool in the Migration Toolkit for Applications that you can use to assess and prioritize migration and modernization efforts for applications. It provides numerous reports that highlight the analysis without using the other tools. The CLI includes a wide array of customization options. By using the CLI, you can tune MTA analysis options or integrate with external automation tools.
