Java Swing Migration

For years, companies have struggled translating the investment made in Java Swing applications to the web. They try things like Java Web Start – but quickly find that it’s too cumbersome and the application downloads take forever. After the Web Start fails to impress, a “quick” solution is needed and the next step is usually a JSP driven page with some Javascript sprinkled in to it to give the appearance of a rich application, but soon the performance and complexity woes of javascript come to light.

Nexaweb's Enterprise Web Suite is built on Java technology and embraces the principles of the open Web, while still delivering the desktop application performance and capabilities of Swing.

Some of the distinct modernization capabilities enabled by Nexaweb include:

• Re-use Swing Components – Nexaweb’s Architecture enables you to re-use as much or as little of your existing swing components. Nexaweb’s plug-in architecture allows for any Swing or AWT components to be instantiated in the same declarative XML format used by the Nexaweb UI
• Declarative User Interface – Uses XML for user interface definition, meaning there is no code necessary to build complicated, highly interactive UI
• Internet Messaging Bus – Allows for real time, push connections, polling, and reliable messaging to ensure that data is delivered to the client when it needs to without having to perform any refreshing of the browser. All messaging bus activity utilizes HTTP and is guaranteed to work over complicated network topologies whether the application is exposed to the internet, internal intranet, or both
• Client Side Java – Nexaweb allows for client side Java to process business logic and enables code re-use between the client and the server. This allows for application architects to decide the best use of processing power to maximize performance and minimize server loads and bandwidth. Also – this eliminates your development staff to learn specific scripting languages that is always client specific
• Leverage the Open Web – Use open source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, and iBatis on the middle tier. Integrate directly with web-services and other REST-ful APIs
• Flexible Deployment – Always have the option to deploy as a desktop application or delivered through the web-browser, no extra code required
• Modular Design – Nexaweb only loads the parts of the application that your users are currently working in, if they don’t have access to or use certain functionality of an application, then those parts won’t be downloaded until they are used
• Visual Editing – Nexaweb Studio allows for visual editing of web application to enabled drag and drop creation of complex enterprise applications

Making the switch

Moving from Swing to other application frameworks usually involves much code re-writing and redesigning. Fortunately, Nexaweb has the unique capability to re-use Swing components through our plug-in architecture. As much or as little of your Swing application can be re-used through the plug-in architecture. Some customers have packaged individual components (custom buttons, charts, graphs, tables) while others have opted to move entire screens and workflows, the Nexaweb plug-in architecture only cares that the your component extends the javax.swing.JComponent object in order to be instantiated on the Nexaweb client.

The important thing to note about Nexaweb’s client is that the most common UI elements that Swing uses are provided to you in a much more lightweight fashion than Swing gives. Nexaweb provides the basic widgets to build any enterprise application. Our widgets are styleable with style-sheets right out of the box, so your own design sense and color schemes can be put together separate from the UI definition. Since UI widgets are instantiated via XML instead of code in a jar file somewhere, there is no need to have large jar files which are solely for setting up what the user interface looks like, all that is needed is a bit of XML which can be processed in pieces, instead of all at once – allowing for a much more agile and lightweight application.