Chapter 1. Introduction
All customers using this product should start their transition to Migration Toolkit for Applications.
Migration Toolkit for Applications is fully backwards compatible with all features and rulesets available in Migration Toolkit for Runtimes and will be maintained in the long term.
1.1. About the Rule Development Guide
This guide is intended for software engineers who want to create custom YAML-based rules for Migration Toolkit for Runtimes (MTR) tools.
See the Introduction to the Migration Toolkit for Runtimes for an overview and the CLI Guide for details.
1.1.1. Use of <MTR_HOME> in this guide
This guide uses the <MTR_HOME> replaceable variable to denote the path to your MTR installation. The installation directory is the mtr-1.2.7.GA-offline directory where you extracted the MTR .zip file.
When you encounter <MTR_HOME> in this guide, replace it with the actual path to your MTR installation.
1.2. The MTR rules
The Migration Toolkit for Runtimes (MTR) contains rule-based migration tools (analyzers) that you can use to analyze the application user interfaces (APIs), technologies, and architectures used by the applications you plan to migrate. MTR analyzer rules use the following rule pattern:
when(condition) message(message) tag(tags)
You can use the MTR rules internally to perform the following tasks:
- Extract files from archives.
- Decompile files.
- Scan and classify file types.
- Analyze XML and other file content.
- Analyze the application code.
- Build the reports.
MTR builds a data model based on the rule execution results and stores component data and relationships in a graph database. This database can then be queried and updated as required by the migration rules and for reporting purposes.
You can create your own custom analyzer rules. You can use custom rules to identify the use of custom libraries or other components that might not be covered by the provided standard migration rules.
For instructions on how to write custom rules, see [Rule Development Guide].
