Swing2Script: Migration of Java-Swing Applications to Ajax Web Applications

Platform migration is a core problem in software reengineering, since applications are frequently deemed useful in environments other than the ones in which they were originally implemented. The World-Wide-Web in particular is becoming a target platform of choice because of its pervasiveness, and a substantial class of applications that could benefit from migration to the Web is that of Java graphical user interface (GUI) desktop applications. To that end, we have recently developed Swing2Script, an interaction-reengineering approach for automatically migrating Java-Swing applications to Ajax-enabled Web- based applications. The approach reverse engineers the structure and behavior of Java Swing GUIs, using aspects woven unobtrusively in the original application. Based on the extracted model, it automatically builds an Ajax-enabled front end, which drives the relevant workflows of the original application. In this paper, we describe our migration approach and the middleware on which it relies, and we illustrate it with a case study.