Mismatch between executing environments: issues in migrating distributed object applications to Web

There are tremendous interests and activities in migrating distributed desktop applications to the Web to take advantage of its explosive opportunities. Many would think that the migration effort would be minimal if the application is built using an object oriented and platform independent language, such as Java. While there is less effort in porting a distributed Java application to the Web, the migration effort involves more than just the portability issue. The authors highlight several different, but more pervasive issues when they migrated a distributed object application to the Web. Specifically, they use their experience of migrating a Java/CORBA desktop application to the Web to illustrate that the issues of download size, browser security, incompatibility of virtual machines and Web based protocols are at least as important as the issue of portability. All the issues arise due to the mismatch between the desktop and Web execution environments. The authors present their solutions and highlight several strategies for dealing with future migration of distributed object applications to the Web environment