Beyond the Black Box: A Case Study in C to Java Conversion and Product Extensibility

This case study describes the experience of converting and enhancing NDBS 1.0 (Netscape Database Keystore), a programmatic library to extract private keys and digital certificates from a Netscape database written in C and Java. The result of this work is NDBS 2.0, a 100% Java version of NDBS 1.0 designed to support other keystores easily. NDBS 2.0 also includes write and delete capabilities, features that were not present in NDBS 1.0. The case study describes the experience of the conversion and development process, difficulties, and lessons learned.