migrating data from tomcat .dbx files

Question

I want to migrate data from an old Tomcat/Jetty website to a new one which runs on Python & Django. Ideally I would like to populate the new website by directly reading the data from the old database and storing them in the new one.

Problem is that the database I was given comes in the form of a bunch of WEB-INF/data/*.dbx and I didn't find any way to read them. So, I have a few questions.

• Which format do the WEB-INF/data/*.dbx use?
• Is there a python module for directly reading from the WEB-INF/data/*.dbx files?
• Is there some external tool for dumpint the WEB-INF/data/*.dbx to an ascii format that will be parsable by python?
• If someone has attempted a similar data migration, how does it compare against scraping the data from the old website? (assuming that all important data can be scraped)

Thanks!

Answer 1

The ".dbx" suffix has been used by various softwares over the years so it could be almost anything. The only way to know what you really have here is to browse the source code of the legacy java app (or the relevant doc or ask the author etc).

wrt/ scraping, it's probably going to be a lot of a pain for not much results, depending on the app.