OK, I am gonna make the foolish assumption that that by "without rewriting" you mean "without starting over". Because once your project would qualify as MVC, you will have rewrote a significant portion of it.
I am not gonna lie to you, its gonna be hard. But it is doable.
Literature
The first thing I would suggest you would be to grab a copy of Michael Feather Working with Legacy Code. Its full of great advice on how to handle and work with the kind of code you describe. You should also grab Martin Fowler Refactoring and Joshua Kerievsky Refactoring to Pattern. Those techniques will very useful for changing your code.
How to work on the problem
Some important point as you work on your code are
- Avoid biting more than you can chew
- Always keep your code working
To handle the first point, make sure that you always change a little portion of your code at a time. For the second, make sure that you have acceptance test in place that will make sure that you don't break the code as you change it.
The procedure I used myself when reworking old JSP file like your code was the following
- Isolate a specific functionality to rewrite
- Write a few Acceptance test that check the behavior (Selenium will be a very good tool)
- Now the fun part. Create a new empty class and a UnitTest Suite
- Read the code, find the simplest part of code you can put in your class
- Test the small statement
- Put the code of the statement in your class
- Replace the statement with a call to your class
- Refactor your class to make it readable, not being afraid to create new classes if you see multiple concern emerge. Don't forget to refactor your test too!
- Go to 4, and continue until all the code is in your tested classes
Now, as you extract the procedural code in your class, you will start to see pattern emerge. Duplication will become obvious (old code like this tend to be pretty copy and paste). Reengineer your class to reflect your new comprehension of the problem.
One thing you may notice is that as you go, you will start to go quite faster, because the copy pasted code so prevalent in those application will already be in one of your refactored class. Then you will encounter code written by another person and you be slow again. Its normal.
Don't hesitate to stop from time to time and move code around in your refactored class to create a nicer architecture. As you go, you may end up with an MVCish framework. Or you may have sometime that fit your problem in its own way. The nice thing is that you will a nice suite of test to cover you as you do.
Now of course, the problem is that you will want to add feature to the application sooner than later. You can use that. When you need to add something to a part of code, do the refactoring first for that part of code. That way, you will slowly improve the design as you add feature. Its gonna be slower but in the long run you will go faster because the code will be easier to maintain.
I wish you luck!
