Migration of legacy Java desktop applications to collaborative Web

Abstract

The migration of legacy applications to more advanced technology platforms has been a recurring theme in the academic and business sectors. This transformation is driven by the desire to overcome the limitations of traditional desktop applications and integrate advanced remote access and collaboration capabilities. Essential features not only for technology upgrade but also to enable organizations to take advantage of remote collaboration.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this need, forcing many organizations to adopt remote work and online collaboration modalities, forcing them to transform their information systems. There are various methodologies and techniques, such as conversion, redeployment and wrapping, that offer different approaches to facilitate this migration by minimizing the effort required during the process. This paper specifically studies the migration of Java Swing applications to web environments, particularly those that incorporate collaborative functionalities. Several solutions that follow different migration strategies have been evaluated, performing a more detailed analysis of the Vaadin platform as an efficient tool to perform this migration, with limited effort and special attention to the inclusion of new collaborative functionalities. Finally, a migration procedure is defined that has been validated through two case studies.