Embed a Java applet in a Web Project

Question

The company I work for has one of their main products written in Java, it is an applet made up of numerous sub programs. Our goal would be to develop an alternative GUI to the current Java using Web technologies and build it to be cross-platform. The applet is very large and it is therefore necessary to implement this transformation gradually.

To achieve this we would like to gradually replace the individual applet programs with their corresponding HTML/CSS/Javascript version.

Is there a "container" (so far I have taken into consideration Electron, Qt and, the new kid in town, Tauri) or a stack of technologies that allows you to start a Java applet within it?

Answer 1

You might consider using CheerpJ: A fully Web based technology designed to run unmodified Java applications (including GUIs) on any modern browser.

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpj/

Beside running the whole application or applet as it currently is, you can also use the JavaScript interoperability API to build a pure HTML5 Web app on top of the existing Java code.

https://docs.leaningtech.com/cheerpj/Runtime-API#cjresolvecall--cjresolvenew

Full disclosure: I am lead dev of CheerpJ and CTO of Leaning Technologies