Appletizing: running legacy Java code remotely from a Web browser

Adding distributed capabilities to existing programs has come to the forefront of software evolution. As a standard Java distributed technology, applets offer the advantages of being easily deploy able over Web browsers and requiring little to no explicit distributed programming. Yet applets are inflexible: they download remote code and run it only on the client machine. We present appletizing: a semi-automatic approach to transforming a Java GUI application into a client-server application, in which the client runs as a Java applet that communicates with the server through RMI. To enable appletizing, we have expanded the capabilities of J-Orchestra, our automatic partitioning system that takes as input a Java application in bytecode format and transforms it into a distributed application, running across multiple standard JVMs. We discuss the motivation, benefits, and J-Orchestra support for appletizing, and validate our approach via a set of case studies and associated benchmarks.