Our client is a Large Defence Contractor focusing on the Aerospace, Defence and Security sectors, headquartered in Europe, with a worldwide customer base.

Just like many large organisations, they rely heavily on a number of mission-critical legacy applications, many of which have been built in Flash. These internal applications ranged from HR tools to manage staff overtime to order processing/management with 1000s of worldwide users. 

With the deprecation of the Adobe Flash Player in January 2021, it has become increasingly challenging to access these all-important applications and our client has been forced to keep an instance of Internet Explorer running on their internal networks. 

After extensive research and testing, the Client decided to work with Leaning Technologies using the CheerpX for Flash technology, to continue accessing their Flash applications on modern browsers, dropping their dependency on Internet Explorer.

The Technical Issue

Using CheerpX for Flash, our HTML5 Flash emulator, we could provide a solution that allowed their Flash content to run seamlessly on any modern browser, after the end of the life of the Flash player.

Over 30 back office applications, some served over internal VPNs, some served on the public internet, included at least one page with a Flash application, most of which were based on the Flex framework. 

CheerpX for Flash was hosted on different HTTP servers depending on the network topology and integrated into these applications by simply editing the HTML page referencing the Flash. In some cases, this was a basic HTML page, and in other cases a jsp or other dynamically generated HTML. In all cases, integrating CheerpX for Flash required only a few lines of HTML to be changed.

The Result

Previously these Flash applications were only compatible with Internet Explorer, which opened them up to a number of security issues, and maintenance costs. 

Thanks to CheerpX for Flash, they can now access their mission-critical applications from any modern browser, reducing the risks of keeping a legacy browser running. Due to these applications now running within the browser sandbox, CheerpX for Flash has radically improved the safety profile of these Flash applications.