Promises and perils of porting software visualization tools to the web

Software systems are hard to understand due to the complexity and the sheer size of the data to be analyzed. Software visualization tools are a great help as they can sum up large quantities of data in dense, meaningful pictures. Traditionally such tools come in the form of desktop applications. Modern web frameworks are about to change this status quo, as building software visualization tools as web applications can help in making them available to a larger audience in a collaborative setting. Such a migration comes with a number of promises, perils and technical implications that have to be taken into account before starting any migration process. In this paper we share our experiences in porting two such tools to the web and discuss the promises and perils that go hand in hand with such an endeavour.