The Immigration authority of a Southeast Asian country had a mission-critical internal application written in Java Swing, used daily by hundreds of members of staff for necessary operations.

The application was written over a long period of time by a large team of developers, amounting to several hundreds of thousands lines of code.

In order to modernise their internal systems, a decision was made centrally to abandon Java-based applications on client machines (i.e. traditional ‘Desktop’ Java applications), due to the high costs of maintenance of these systems. The cost and timeline of a full reimplementation of this application would have been very significant, and was deemed impossible.

To solve this issue, our Client utilised the CheerpJ technology. CheerpJ was used to perform an ahead-of-time conversion of the application to HTML5, which worked correctly and in full, and was deployed as an internal web application.

The resulting application is an almost pixel-perfect rendition of the original Java Swing client, but can run on any of the end-user browsers, provided over HTTPS on an internal network. This allowed our client to no longer maintain Java 8 installations on all of their user machines.

The Result

The application is still actively maintained in Java, and CheerpJ has been integrated into the CI/CD pipeline of our Client. As a result of this migration, their client system no longer depends on Java and can access the application from any modern browser.

By using CheerpJ, the Client drastically reduced their development timeline and effort for updating this application, eliminating the risk of duplicating bugs and re-implementing complex features. By preserving their entire Java code base, they were also able to make the most of their existing developer skills.

This public-sector client has a long-term maintenance agreement with Leaning Technologies, with guaranteed development time, and we look forward to supporting them on their journey.