Is there a way to run a Java Applet in node.js, at server side?

Question

Is there a way to run a Java Applet in node.js, at server side?

It may sound crazy, but I am looking for a way to run a third party java applet on my node.js app server.

It is used to do a weird calculation that I am not willing to migrate to JavaScript code. Is this possible in any way? Any suggestions? I am in need to send the result of this calculation as a web page to the user, based on a request param.

I was initially thinking of how can I communicate between node.js and an Java Applet running standalone. Googled a bit but no success at all. Can someone suggest how to better google for it or point some good resources???

Answer 1

Using JNI will not help you as applets will not run in a headless environment. Applets are directly dependant on AWT so require a GUI environment to run.

Presuming that the license issues of the applet allow you to reuse the code, then my solution is to decompile the classes for the applet and use the generated java to create a normal java class with main that will run the desired calculations and return the result.

Unless the code is obfuscated, it's relatively simple to understand the decompiled code and should be relatively painless to adapt for what you wish to do.

Once you have your java code working from the command line you can then use the node-java project to call the java code from node.js and get your result.