What is the best way to port a java desktop application to run in browser?

Question

I'm a pretty skilled java programmer that has dabbled in web development but I find that I'm much better at doing desktop based stuff than I am at anything related to web development. I've been trying to find an easy way of porting some of my desktop apps to run in browser but can't seem to find anything. I guess what I'm looking for is something similar to an applet but they a largely unsupported and get more buggy by the day. Is there anything similar that would allow me to keep my desktop style mindset and still run in browser or should I just break down and rewrite the whole thing in rails or another common web platform.

Answer 1

Nowadays Web Start is not a good option since, the user needs to have JVM installed and with all the vulnerabilities buzz around Java is more difficult to convince users to download it. The latest versions of JDK 1.8+ include scripts to pack your application along the jvm runtime in just one installer: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/deploy/

For using your application in a browser like an applet, you can use Bck2Brwsr or TeaVM both can run java applications in a browser without Java Plugin. Bck2Brwsr also uses Java Plug in if it is available.

You can also use GWT to compile your Java application to JavaScript. Note: Swing is not supported.

Regards

Answer 2

Java WebStart has been mentioned by others - It's a technology that aids redistribution of Java applications that then have the full rights of desktop applications, but they also have auto-update support built in. It's basically a launcher that fetches a JAR from the internet and runs it as a desktop application. These don't run within the browser.

Applets are an old technology that can be embedded directly into the web-page. They are not buggy, but they have several security restrictions. Also, the support is steadily declining because of the amount of critical bugs found in the technology. Desktop users that want applet support typically don't have trouble ensuring it, however. Currently, both the Chrome and the Java platform itself issue a warning before an applet is allowed to run - and that assumes the Java Runtime Environment is already installed.

Google Web Toolkit is a framework that allows creating single-page applications in Java, which are then compiled to Javascript. GWT handles multiple things behind the scenes, including server-client communication, localisation and internationalisation, and its own layout engine.

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When translating an existing application to GWT, you need to:

• separate the code into a part that runs on the client and a part that runs on the server. The server does not have direct access to the user, and the client does not have direct access to the database. If your application does not use centralised storage, it probably can run entirely within the web browser. Since client-server communication happens over the internet, you should reduce it to the minimum.
• translate the front-end to GWT widgets. Forget Swing or AWT - they are impossible to compile efficiently to Javascript.
• remove dependency on other Java classes that the GWT does not know how to translate into Javascript in the client part of the application. A large part of java.util. is supported but none of javax. (as of Jan 2014). The GWT site hosts the list of supported Java classes. Also, Javascript's regexes are less powerful than those of Java. Lookbehinds, in particular, are not supported. The server-side is a full-blown Java environment, but remember - you want to reduce the server-client communication to the minimum.

But, the most common strategy is to code the client side directly in Javascript.

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Javascript is a language very similar in syntax to C/C++ and Java. It uses curly braces to denote blocks of code, and it uses semicolons to separate statements (though Javascript features automatic semicolon insertion, sometimes it understands two lines as a single statement if the first line is not terminated by a semicolon. Its data types include numbers (double-precision floating point), strings, booleans, two types of null, plain objects (which are basically hash-maps [string -> x]), arrays (untyped and dynamically extensible), regexes and functions (named or anonymous), all of which have their own literal syntax.

When coding in Javascript, your mindset should be:

• Javascript is single-threaded and event-driven. You don't have to worry about concurrency issues, but you cannot say "now wait for x" either. Since Your Java code should be event-driven as well, this should not be an issue.
• Lots of things in Javascript are asynchronous. Want to know something from the user? You should paint a dialog, and attach event handlers to its components. Want to get the user's GPS position? Ask for permission, passing it an event handler for when the user decides if the permission should be granted, from which you ask for the position, which also takes an event handler as an argument. Talking to the server? Asynchronous. Do you want to display something before doing a long calculation? You have to actually wait a little before you start computing. Ecmascript 6 improves the syntax a lot, but it's not yet supported in modern browsers.
• Browsers only let you do so much. Disk access? Only to a file or folder the user explicitly points to. Clipboard access? The only reliable way is copy/paste into a textbox. Talking to a foreign webserver? Only if that webserver explicitly lets you (and lot of them don't even know how to). Of course, "foreign" includes a different sub-domain, different port number or a different protocol (http:// or https://). Desktop notifications? Geolocation? Ask for permissions first. Java applets have comparable security restrictions, and for the very same reason.
• In Java, everything is a class. In Javascript, you can enjoy bare functions without any class. A typical event handler is just an anonymous function that you pass as an argument to a library function. Also, you can have anonymous objects using a very conscise syntax. This makes Javascript code much denser than that of Java and with very few classes, if any. Object Oriented Programming is still possible in Javascript, but much less pronounced.
• When layouting your display, you need to think in terms of HTML and CSS. The best approach is to modify only the document structure (adding/removing elements or HTML classes) using the Document Object Model (DOM), and leave all CSS in an external file. In any case, you need to know CSS enough to be able to layout your page. Modern browsers support canvas, but it has no built-in layouting engine - its closest Java relative is JCanvas - just a blank area where you can draw graphics primitives - or a WebGL canvas - where you can place triangles in a 3D space.
• When designing your own API, you need to know which operations might need to be asynchronous. If they are, either take a function as an argument (a callback), or return an object that does (a promise).

• Except for the this variable, Javascript is function-scoped and lexically scoped and has closures. If a variable exists in a surrounding scope, it can be read from and written to - even from within a function that is only defined in that scope and called much later. In Java, you can't close over non-final function-local variables.

  However, you need to be careful about timing - don't think you can just assign to a variable within a callback and use it outside. When you try to use it, it won't have been assigned to yet. Many have tried to cheat the time this way, and failed.

• When the user leaves your page, it's a game over. If you want to remember anything past that point, you need to store it somewhere, be it cookies (very little space, outdated API), localStorage (decent amount of space, not supported by very old browsers) or the server (lots of space, but talking to the server when your page is being shut down is tricky).
• the DOM API is often criticised, but there are several frameworks and libraries that ease the usage of it, of which the most popular is jQuery, which also handles browser inconsistencies, improves the AJAX API, event delegation (you can't attach an event handler to an element that doesn't yet exist) and includes an animation engine (though modern CSS is almost as powerful and often easier to use).

Answer 3

I suggest you to take a look at Java Web Start. It offers you a possibility to start your application software for the Java Platform directly from the Internet using a web browser.

For more details see: Java Web Start

Answer 4

I think java web start could help you

http://www.java.com/it/download/faq/java_webstart.xml