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I am researching possible ways to deploy an existing Java Swing application in a browser such that the client would not need to have a Java runtime installed (and "plugged into" the browser).

The application including the UI would need to run on a server, but the GUI should then "somehow" be rendered in a plain vanilla (of course JavaScript-enabled) browser. Performance and scalability are for once not an issue here...

The challenge is to get away with minimal changes or wrappers of the original Swing application.

I am aware of Eclipse RAP that allows something like that and using the SWT_AWT bridge it should then be possible to embed the Swing UI inside an SWT wrapper and render that on a browser.

I wonder, whether there are any other alternatives or approaches that come to mind?

Cheers, Michael

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  • This isn't good enough for an answer but have you looked at the Echo framework yet? echo.nextapp.com/site Of course the original Swing application will have to be adapted to the new classes but with any luck its general architecture could stay the same. Commented Jan 26, 2011 at 11:00
  • wow, I remember multiple frameworks doing just that, taking swing code and rendering on web. but that's years ago. now people just don't even think about that any more. good luck digging these frameworks out of grave. Commented Jan 26, 2011 at 11:37
  • @biziclop: yes - I had found Echo. But as you noted yourself, it would need a major rewrite of the app. I haven't looked into it deep enough to see, whether classnames and the API in general is similar enough to Swing, so that one essentially would just have to change the imports, but I doubt it. Commented Jan 26, 2011 at 11:44
  • The last time I checked, they looked fairly similar, but there has to be a better solution out there. Commented Jan 26, 2011 at 12:44

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AjaxSwing (formerly known as WebCream)seems to promise to do exactly that. I have no experience using it myself however.

Slightly related, but probably no direct help: someone has done the same to the GTK 3 UI Toolkit.

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Thanks - that was indeed very interesting and thus helpful! Checking it out right now!
It's amazing how far it gets! it almost works, but, alas, crashes due to some ClassCastException when popping up a standard info-dialog, i.e. doing a JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(...); It's a real pitty - it would be so close!

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